Sofia Art Week 9: art in survival mode
Performance, collective action and unexpected encounters across Sofia, until 1 November.
Past event · 24 Oct – 1 Nov 2026 · Various venues, Sofia
When crisis becomes the backdrop to everyday life,
from war and climate breakdown to digital surveillance, political polarisation and growing uncertainty, how do we survive a reality that keeps shifting beneath our feet? Sofia Art Week 9 (SAW) puts the question to artists, performers, choreographers, writers, musicians and people working between disciplines. Its theme is Post Contemporary Survival Strategies. Survival here means more than holding out: it’s something collective, physical and imaginative, a way to rehearse resistance, practise care and invent new forms of closeness and community.
Sofia Art Week 9 makes room for experimentation and work that unfolds in the making:
performances, collective actions, interventions, lecture-performances, rituals, sound and movement practices, and hybrid forms that slip beyond the usual boundaries of art.
The questions range from mutual aid and ecological adaptation to life under algorithms, bodies under pressure and care as resistance. There’s space for imagined futures, rituals for uncertain times, collapse and regeneration, as well as humour, absurdity and imagination as ways to keep going.
Survival takes invention as well as endurance.
SAW invites audiences into its self-described terr(OR)itorry through performance as experiment, encounter, rehearsal, resistance, ritual, failure, invitation and care. The organisers propose trying out different ways of existing, without promising answers or predictions. They describe their zero-budget model as a response to what they see as a shift in European funding priorities towards militarisation. That is the festival’s stated position. This edition brings more than 60 artists from around the world into seven spaces across Sofia. It opened on 24 October at Atelier Trotoar and NIVO, followed by an opening at Doza Gallery on 26 October, and continues until 1 November. Check the festival programme for the remaining events and venues.
ANTISCROLL: what inspired us this week #3
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