PURE /youth/ is an immersive performative installation that investigates the influence of imagination and narratives on our perception of reality and their impact on the relations between “Me” and “others things”.  In PURE /youth/ the audience activates particular “living pictures” simply by incorporating their physical presence into them, thus becoming a composition together. With their personal background, visitors are invited to explore various ways of designing reality “here and now”. ​Blurring the boundaries between visual arts and performance, PURE /youth/ generates interactions between bodies of the audience and objects so that they could function as a distinctive piece of art. 

PURE /youth/ is the second part of the trilogy ETERNIA developed from the Spinoza’s concept of Eternity and is closely linked to birth and death. 

The Bulgarian-French artist Christian Bakalov was born in Bulgaria and after studying at the Ballet School of the Sofia Opera House, he began his dance career at the “Jeune Ballet de France”, Paris and the “Centre Chorégraphique de Nantes in France” (CCNN). Since 2009 he has been living and working in Brussels, where he took part in the opening of the independent performance space “Volksroom”, directed by the Bulgarian artist Ivo Dimchev, with whom has collaborated in several works. He has also performed for Jan Fabre, Robert Wilson, Jérôme Bel, Miet Warlop and Florentina Holzinger & Vincent Riebeek. In 2013 Bakalov started developing “BRIGHT”, his first immersive performative installation, in which the audience plays the main role. In 2019, Christian Bakalov developed the concept of his trilogy ETERNIA, (BRIGHT – PURE – ETERNAL) a performative experiment during which the audience gradually becomes part of a visual installation, in and of itself. Blurring the boundaries between performative action and installation, Christian Bakalov develops a series of immersive methods in order to introduce the audience to a parallel universe, playing with their senses through one-on-one guided tours.