(c) Archive Kathleen Bomani
In 2020, Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Eastern European Network Exchange Program has been extended with new partners from Bulgaria. The three small art initiatives from Sofia, Æther, Swimming Pool and Radar, along with the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Goethe-Institut Sofia, have created these new connections to draw attention to the cultural and artistic production of South Eastern Europe and for mutual exchange.
Together, the three Bulgarian art initiatives created the RAD.OST residency program as part of the Eastern European Network. Find out more about the program here.
»RAD.OST addresses the way we associate and how we position ourselves in the present. Hopefully, it will live to be a new instrument for dialogue and communication, as well as a base for reflection on a broader scale, but also a safe haven for the artists to recuperate, gather strengths and pluck up the courage to go back to action and creation.«
In view of the current situation, the events by RAD.OST comply with the COVID-19 provisions of the Bulgarian authorities.
Program Kick-Off days
Thursday,
October 29, 2020,
7–11 pm
Small, Low-Key and Cozy, (Un-)Official Opening
Video message by Elke aus dem Moore, Akademie Schloss Solitude
Radar Sofia’s welcoming quiz
Conversation with Florin Flueras, this year’s Rad.Ost resident in Sofia, moderated by Alexander Manuiloffand Viktoria Draganova
Conversation with Valentina Sciarra, this year’s Rad.Ost resident in Stuttgart, moderated by Alexander Manuiloff and Viktoria Draganova
Concert by Anna Bo (by invitation from Æther)
DJ Set by Æther
Location: Tell Me Bar, 12 Ivan Vazov str., 1000 Sofia
Friday,
October 30, 2020,
from 7 pm
Æther’s Night
Performative dinner with Natasja Loutchko, Eleonora Meoni, Marta Orlando, Clementine Roy
BLEIBT publication presentation
Location: Æther, ul. Knyaz Boris I 39, 1463 Sofia
Saturday,
October 31, 2020,
11 am–open-end
24 Hours* at Radar (with Halloween party)
11 am–7 pm: Drama Pact performative board game
7 pm–open end: Halloween »Transform Yourself« party
*An open doors policy for 24 hoursso that people may inhabit the premises of the residency from 11 am until the morning next day.
Location: Radar, Strelbishte, bl. 60, Sofia 1408, Bulgarien
Sunday,
November 1, 2020,
2–7 pm
The Library of Our Encounters
A project initiated by Swimming Pool in collaboration with Christoph Szalay and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga.
Location: SWIMMING POOL, 10 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd., 5th floor, Sofia 1000, Bulgarien
Detailed program
Small, Low-Key and Cozy, (Un-)Official Opening
The »Welcoming Quiz« is meant to bring people together in an amusing and playful way. It will make them talk about art, drink and get to know each other in the most natural way possible. There will be few questions from the field of residencies and art practices. Moderated and created by experienced quiz master Paulina Micheva. The winning team gets a prize.
The short talk with artist Florin Flueras famous for his works Unexperiences, Unimages, Unvisitors, Unhere, Unofficial Unworks, Unexist, seems to be just perfect for our unofficial opening of this network exchange. We will have Valentina Sciarra as well, if she is in Sofia at that time.
Æther’s Night
with Natasja Loutchko, Eleonora Meoni, Marta Orlando, Clementine Roy
Æther has invited four core members of the collective Pane Per Poveri (Bread for the poor), that initially began in 2015, when a dozen Berlin based artists occupied Teatro Marinoni on Lido/Italy during the Venice Biennale. In the following year the project expanded during documenta 14 in Athens/Greece – staying as an independent gate of reflections in parallel to the institutional art events as the listed two.
For the past three years the project has transformed into the social framework of the activities of Athens’ Victoria square. Working with refugees and local communities of Athens, the artists’ initiative losing gradually its artistic touch and need for representation. It became a socially engaged platform.
»For the Eastern European Network Kick-off Event we are creating a social ground for meeting, sharing, encounter under the spell of performative dinner and spoken word, we will launch the BLEIBT publication.
We decided to stick with the power and the meaning, despite fear of power, and share weakness, and be true to each other, no matter what and next…
Embrace risks and potentials producing things and thoughts that are intersectional, complementary, horizontal, among our practice, our biographies, our current living, will of activism, hopes of true revolution. Moving around sexual desire and fake hysteria-we build up words and worlds, the ones we want to live in, dreamy, necessary tools to survive the present, and sleep over through the past…«
The four invited artists share different angles and approaches: work is always intersectional, cross folding ideas about feminism, politics, conditions of life and collaboration.
24 Hours* at Radar
Drama Pact boardgame: a durational performative boardgame played by theatre and performance practitioners which manages not only to get people to share stories and experiences but provokes a discussion about the context and art practices in general. It builds a sense of community and is a hot spot for exchange of ideas and even forming of new partnerships and projects. In the same time, it is designed to be deeply entertaining.
The Halloween »Transform Yourself«party is definitely a costume party where you are invited to forget and leave your old self for a moment and find a new expression for the beauty inside you.
Swimming Pool’s »The Library of Our Encounters«
The Library of Our Encounters is a long-term project of Swimming Pool within the residency exchange with Akademie Schloss Solitude, dedicated to what has changed most radically lately: the encounter – as event, presence, time and meaning. The library contains a growing selection of books, carefully collected over the last few years, but it also foregrounds itself as a possible space for a series of encounters among words, ideas, silences, people, aiming to reconsider the trajectory of our thinking in recent months of crisis. The library opens with a textual and spatial arrangement created in collaboration with Christoph Szalay and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. More about the project.
This project takes place in the frame of the Eastern European artist-in-residency exchange program of Akademie Schloss Solitude and is supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State Province of Baden-Württemberg/Germany and Goethe Institute Sofia.
participated in