CMP: Pauline Shongov with Maya Shopova, Off-site Lab

Off-site Lab, headed by Pauline Shongov with Maya Shopova, is a practice-based research initiative that investigates what critical heritage practices are made possible—and how attitudes towards waste and ecology shift—when we re-imagine the role of care in collection, exhibition, and archive strategies. Taking Bulgaria as a case study to contour new modes of curatorial thought, artistic practice, and material urgency, Off-site rethinks local and global, human and nonhuman, relationships to landscape, environment, and placemaking. As a lab, Off-site exists as a mobile and dispersed space for artists, architects, and scholars to collaborate with one another and local communities through exhibitions, workshops, performances, and publications that materialize in physical sites, which they occupy for temporary periods of time. The project will land and observe some of these practices at the ArtLab from March 19 – April 1, 2025. 

The ArtLab will act as both a studio and lab space for Pauline Shongov and Maya Shopova to experiment with the multiple aspects and dimensions of Off-site’s expanded archive on oral history, mythology, folklore, and ethnographic work that they have gathered over the past five years. This archive emerged from the making of the docufiction film Borá when initial encounters with interlocutors and unofficial heritage sites in ruin directly informed—and eventually grew into material, vegetal, mineral, aural, and visual prompt material for—the Off-site Lab. Through multimodal experimentation with elements of fiction, non-fiction, fieldwork, and collaboration, Borá sets the groundwork for re-engaging Off-site’s extensive archive of sound and moving image in new ways. 

Landing in the ArtLab this Spring, the Off-site Lab will enter the next phase of its research at the intersection of the environmental humanities, critical heritage studies, and critical media practice. With the support of the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities, Off-site will also organize “Experiments Afield: Sensing Environment” workshops for Laura Frahm and Bruno Carvalho’s Design and Ecology course and Katarina Burin’s Advanced CMP course along with the Mahindra Humanities Center Conference “Collaborations Afield: Work across Ecologies and Disciplines”. Off-site has been supported by the Harvard Critical Media Practice program, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Pauline Shongov is an artist, filmmaker, and visual/media studies scholar. Her work explores oral, historical, affective, and haptic senses of place as well as local and diasporic forms of community belonging. Currently, she is a Presidential Scholar and doctoral candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She is also the co-founder of the practice-based research initiative Off-site. Her work has been supported by the LEF-Flaherty Fellowship, Harvard Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Cornell Council of the Arts. 

Maya Shopova is an architect and filmmaker based in New York. She holds a BSc in Architecture from McGill University and an MArch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research interests in critical heritage studies and alternative preservation practice meet at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and film. She is the co-founder of the practice-based research initiative Off-site. Her work has been supported by the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative and the Council for the Arts at MIT. She has taught design studios at MIT and McGill University and is currently an associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro.