In 2020, Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Eastern European Network Exchange Programme has been extended with new partners from Bulgaria. The three small art initiatives from Sofia, Æther, Swimming Pool and Radar Sofia, 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 programme as part of the Eastern European Network. »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.

Oct 29,
7 – 23 pm

Small, Low-Key and Cozy, (Un-)Official

Opening Location: Port. A gallery, Sofia, Triaditsa Str.

• 5-min 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 Manuiloff and 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 (invited by Æther)

DJ Set by ÆtherOct 30,
7 pm – Open End

Æther’s Night
Location: Æther, Sofia~BLEIBT~

• publication presentation
• Performative dinner with:
  Natasja Loutchko, Eleonora Meoni,
  Marta Orlando, Clementine Roy

Oct 31

• 11 am – video presentation of the Drama Pact performative board game 24 Hours* at Radar (with a Halloween Party) – cancelled due to healthcare concerns
• 7 pm – Open End - Halloween »Transform Yourself« party*An open doors policy for 24 hours so that people may inhabit the premises of the residency until from 11 am until the morning next day. – cancelled due to healthcare concerns

Nov 1

• 2 – 7 pm

The Library of Our Encounters
Location: Swimming Pool, SofiaA project initiated by Swimming Pool in collaboration with Christoph Szalay and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigog

More info:

(Un-)Official OpeningThe »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. Of course, the winning team gets a prize. The short talk with Florin Flueras, an artist famous for his works Unexperiences, Unimages, Unvisitors, Unhere, Unofficial Unworks, Unexist, seems to be just perfect for our unofficial unopening of this network exchange. We will have Valentina Sciara as well, who is back from Stuttgart for a day.

Æther’s Night
with Natasja Loutchko, Eleonora Meoni,
Marta Orlando, Clementine RoyÆther 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 during the Venice Biennale. In the following year, the project expanded during Documenta 14 in Athens – 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 melted and merged, transformed into the social framework of the activities of Athens’ Victoria square, the artists’ initiative, working with refugees and local communities of Athens, losing gradually its artistic touch and need for representation, it rather became a socially engaged platform.»For the Eastern European Network Kick-off Event we are creating a social ground for a 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 the 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 sleepover through the past…«
The four invited artists are sharing different angles and approaches. The work is always intersectional, cross folding ideas about Feminism, politics, conditions of life, and collaboration.

24 Hours* at Radar SofiaDrama 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.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 EncountersThe 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: https://swimmingpoolprojects.org/…/the-library-of-our…/

This project takes place in the frame of the Eastern Europe Artist-In-Residency- Exchange Program of the 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.
www.swimmingpoolprojects.org
www.radarsofia.org
https://aether-artspace.com/
In view of the current situation, our events comply with the provisions of the Bulgarian authorities and contribute to limiting coronavirus infection