distance and resistance

DISTANCE AND RESISTANCE OPEN CALL for residencies at Radar Sofia Radar Sofia is announcing an open call for artists for three fully-funded residencies in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2022 under its year-long programme Distance and Resistance. Radar Sofia is a small artist-run organization that functions as a residency space, a production house and a platform for development of new dramaturgy.

Every year Radar Sofia proposes a curatorial line with a main theme and a series of guest artists – invited or selected through an international open call – who give a lecture or workshop sharing their methods and practices, and/or create a performance involving local participants in the work process. One of the aims of these curatorial lines is to develop the local artistic field through critical discourse, free non-formal education and new experimental formats, as well as to create opportunities for Bulgarian artists to form partnerships and collaborate with international professionals. Radar Sofia as an international place for experimental artistic practice has so far created and supported numerous spin-off projects coming up as a result of the residencies. You can look at the website for the full list of previous residents and projects (sections ‘news’ and ‘our residents’).

Social distancing, border closures, postponement of plans and projects, cancellation of festivals and residencies as well as a general sense of growing isolationism made us choose the theme of Distance and Resistance. If the situation with the pandemic only intensifies and makes visible what we've already been living through for a long time – a migration from the physical to the digital world, increasing work insecurity, social and physical distancing – then how does our artistic practice respond to these processes, how does it resist them, how does it offer alternatives and how does it distance itself from the ready-made solutions? Radar Sofia is the first and only residency in the Bulgarian context, focused on dramaturgy understood in a very broad sense. We ask you and ourselves: what can dramaturgy contribute to the world of today, how can it bring people together and how can it help re-imagine our contexts? We believe the digital cannot be the only alternative during health and climate catastrophes, especially for artistic practices rooted in the live body and the meeting between people, that's why we insist on offering physical residencies, live in Sofia.

There are three deadlines for the three different time slots as follows: Feb 1 for a residency starting in May, response by Feb 15 March 1 for a residency starting in June, response by March 15 May 31 for a residency starting in September/October, response by June 15 The residencies last for a minimum of one month with a possibility for extension.