Project description

Abortion Kills Children, 2008, 7 days action during which the artist makes 500 holes daily in one of the walls in the gallery (200/270 cm), inscription on the wall, slideshow with pictures of aborted embryos.

Project Proposal:
“For one week, Samuel Stoyanov will make 500 holes daily in the central column of the Meeting Point in the Vaska Emanuilova Gallery. In this time and at this pace the artist will not be able to cause fatal consequences to the building, but the destructive process he will carry out will most likely have intangible characteristics. The focus of the action will be the artist’s personal experience, where the hammering of parts of the wall will not be a mere construction activity, but an action loaded with traumatic content. This action in which the number of holes will correspond to the number of abortions performed at the same time (daily) in Bulgaria.

Abortion kills children is a well-known pro-life slogan that for some is an obvious truth, while for others it is an expression of violation of their personal freedom and right to choose. Samuil Stoyanov uses it as a starting point in his project, because the contradictions and incompatibilities in the theses “for” and “against” are huge anyway, and if someone decides to have an opinion there is no way it can be somewhere in the middle. Samuil is the kind of artist for whom the process of creating a work is not important, but in this case his main goal, besides illustrating the problem during his action, is to experience his own opinion by documenting his reactions and feelings.

As part of the Open Space / Democratic Citizens initiative by Per Hasselberg (founder of Konsthall C in Stockholm), the Abortion Kills Children project debates one of the basic democratic rights and principles, namely, right to life issues, the right to informed decision-making, and also the question of whether abortion is discriminatory by imposing the position of the older, stronger and more numerous, and whether this ultimately leads to destructive processes and trauma in society and in people’s individual consciousness.”