SAW SOFIA ART WEEK vol.5
*RE-SPIRIT
TRANS-SPIRIT*
Sofia 18.10-25.10
Varna 07.11-14.11
all info and full program at:
www.sofiaartweek.com
For the 5th sequent year Æther Sofia invites you to take part in an open dialogue, a visual and discursive tale of narratives, angles and perspectives, a woven spider net operating system, addressing the banality of evil and spreading the importance of politics of care.
In its 2022 edition, RE-SPIRIT / TRANS-SPIRIT is seen as a collective attempt to bring forth urgent issues and topics as one fertile piece of soil rather than fragmented polluted waste-grounds. It invites connections to flow and undercurrents, it creates unexpected movements, and amplifies motives that make one organism vital and strong. It wants to trigger the importance of collective thinking, to wake up the unconscious, while gaining new skills and language to surge the residues of political, social, economic, and human injustices, when needed most – TODAY!
We see the present political instability as a possibility to fuel the city of Sofia with a platform that unfolds as a gift and provides a possibility to share and openly discuss the current state of affairs, locally as well as globally.We argue that we urgently need a policy that puts care first and foremost. By care, we not only mean ‘hands-on’ care, or the work people do when looking after the physical and emotional needs to others – this is obviously critical and urgent as this dimension of caring remains. However, ‘care’ is also understood as a social capacity and activity that includes the care of everything necessary for the well-being and flourishing of life.
To put care center stage means to recognize and embrace our interdependencies. In this collective manifesto, we use the term ‘care’ generously to embrace family and community care, activate cooperative alternatives and create solidarity economies. ‘Care’ becomes our collective and individual capacity to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that enable the vast majority of people and living beings on this planet to thrive, along with the planet itself. With this approach, we want to understand care as active and necessary on every scale of life.
To begin with, SAW will attempt to diagnose the interconnected nature of the current reign of carelessness. It purposefully travels from the global dimensions that put profit over people through careless states and communities, to how the banality of carelessness ultimately affects our interpersonal intimacies. Sofia Art Week investigates the interplay of movements, scaling up from the personal to the planetary, in order to outline caring alternatives to our contemporary condition.
Different art and social practices will intersect to discover the capacity and potentiality of care, shared and resourced on an egalitarian basis. We will not offer solutions, but sketches of caring-imaginaries, which draw on past examples, present manifestations and future possibilities for forms of interconnected care. Rethinking these dependencies of care is pivotal for politics today if we hope to foster a politics of tomorrow.
Not care, but carelessness is the slogan led by the capitalist machine. The dominant life-draining system strongly leans on histories of devaluation, reshaping and deepening inequality, while we lose human belonging and dignity, as a result of the effective practice of demolition and erasing the vocabulary and meaning of care. No wonder right-wing politics and populism have once again proved seductive. It is easily fueled, given the deep difficulties and unbearable collective fears of living in an indifferent world.
Defensive self-interest pursues in circumstances like these when our sense of security and comfort is disrupted. Do you care for yourself exclusively? Is there anything left to care for others? We fail to challenge the limits placed on our caring capacities, practices and imaginations.Now what we wonder would happen if we instead put care at the center of life?
REMAIN INCORRUPTABLE THE SPIRITS OF CREATURES, WHO ARE EMANATIONS OF THE MOST SUBLIMATED PORTIONS OF ÆTHER, ARE BREATHS NOT FORMS.
