I Want Back Home (said the big frog)

“I want to go back home!”, said the big frog

I am really scared of flying. I hate it. I used to fly a lot, always taking pills, shaking like a coward up there in the bumpy skies. Therefore, for the past two years, whenever my presence as an artist at a certain exhibition is (really) needed, I drive there with my wife from Sofia, our home city. So far, this has worked okay within Europe (and England, if I leave the car in French territory and go under the Channel).

It’s a bit harder though to reach China by car. That is why I began this journey by train, traveling fourteen days from Sofia to Shanghai (including two nights in a hotel in Moscow and one in Beijing). Again, as usual, I started the journey together with my wife, but on the seventh day, somewhere in Russia, she had to get off the Trans-Siberian train and fly urgently back to Sofia (due to very sad matters).

What else? Of course – Joji, the big frog, who is the main hero of this fourteen-chapter story (and my main excuse/reason for taking part in this exhibition, while still not flying to Shanghai). Years ago, she was produced in China; then, along with some of her numerous sisters and brothers, shipped (East) to The United States. The frog appeared in a children’s toy shop in New York, where I bought it and used it as a minor character in another story; then she was sent (East) to me in Bulgaria, where she remained in my Sofia studio for awhile.

Here she is – back in China, after the exhausting, eastward train trip, which makes her one of the very few big frogs in China who has actually circled the world.

“I want to go home!” the big frog said to me some time ago in Sofia. Strangely enough, when we arrived here, in Shanghai (both of us intuitively agreed that she was manufactured many years ago somewhere in this area), she gently whispered in my right ear, “I want to go back home, to Sofia!” And it made my day.

P.S. Please, excuse the tons of wrong, misleading, and mispronounced information that I have given in the fourteen narrated videos made while passing through Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Mongolia and China (including the fact that I keep calling Joji a frog when she is actually a toad). But I do confirm that the overall atmosphere recorded in these videos is reliably truthful and it may be used as a reference.

Nedko Solakov
20.10.2010

Edited by Christy Lange