Logo design: Svetlana Mircheva

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For this second edition we are proposing Sofia City to centralize the magnitude of voices and visions and establish the city as an Epicenter of art commodities, exhibitions, events, discussions and before all a meeting point for art practitioners to come together from different places in Europe and outside, and deliver a perspective on current political, social and artistic reproaches and movements emerging or already « flourishing » our world today.
Through line of affinities and moments of crisis, we invite cultural practitioners, theorists and artists to paradoxically sum up with a puzzle that might create sites of unpredictability. To perhaps question the controversial nature of form itself.
In times of over-determined living (war zones, hidden and overtly banal political agendas, spiritual confusion and recourse to post-apocalyptic notions like fatalistic closure on the political question of global warming), freedom appears to be a precarious matter, in a perhaps new way we are barred from articulating.
Political agency itself is caught in a conundrum: What is it, if not an idea and yet controlled by outside forces ?... Is it an individual horizon and in what way does it call for a group action ?
This precarious freedom of the contemporary era, becomes an embodied way of perceiving reality, leaving the individual in a state of stasis, virtual limbo, anticipating a change, but rather creating a negative liminal space both in mental and physical spheres. The play and power of the past century and into the current social, economic and geo-political reality, have created a shift in the mind of the citizens, doubtless making the mark more visible of the split worlds – the privileged and the suffering.
The face of this era, has displayed itself with a new one the one of reoccurring past, unwanted and yet producing possible scenarios for society, that is trapped in totalitarian frames and under new age unspoken slavery.

The instability of the course of events are a sign of psycho- geographical displacement (technology, media, information), and plays an important part in the way we see the method of working in this edition of the SAW.
SAW – past tense of « seeing », « to see ».
SAW – a saw is a tool consisting of a tough blade, wire, or chain with a hard toothed edge. It is used to cut through material, very often wood though sometimes metal or stone. The cut is made by placing the toothed edge against the material and moving it forcefully forth and less forcefully back or continuously forward.
Combining the meaning of this abbreviation, almost like in a mathematic equation we arrive to this proposal – what do we need to witness in order to arrive or relate to the question of the Act...?
What do we need to lose/chop/cut/extract, in order to see through, and truly begin.
The dialectics between seeing and believing take on a new meaning for us to establish a common ground of discussion on the topic of form and sensitivity.
Which is the valid truth, the one that someone tells you, or the one that you experience by doing. We are looking for a new common language, which which we can build a foundation of stability in an unstable setting.
A wish to state not a phobic sensation of passivity and immobility, but rather to urge the desire of encounter and communicate to truly enter and also find a path to exit the void, physicalized in art’s expanded studio.
To perhaps lose the binds of the infinite whip-appropriation of our modern nightmare.
What is beyond, to see through?
 

PLEASE SEND YOUR PROPOSALS NOT LATER THAN
25 MARCH 2019 TO:
Aetherartsofia@gmail.com
Don't hesitate to contact us for any further inquiries.
We are looking forwards to receive your written ideas.