OPEN CALL: CHTO DELAT / AGAINST OBLIVION: THE RITUALS OF LIVING MONUMENTS

Deadline for applictions: 13/10/2025

The new iteration of the on-going platform “International School of Emergencies’’ by the Hamburg/Berlin-based group Chto Delat is to take place in Sofia between October 27th and November 1st, 2025. The Educational Program consists of Workshops & Public Presentation. It is open for application by visual artists, curators and cultural workers interested in projects of engaged art. For more information on the group and the previous iterations of the school: click here.

For registration, please contact: Dmitry Vilensky <dmvilen/@/gmail/./com> with Cc: to ICA-Sofia <info/@/ica-sofia/./org> and Project Coordinator <bilyana/./vacheva/@/gmail/./com> until October 13th, 2025. Participants will be selected on a first-come/first-served basis. Selected participants will be notified by October 20th, 2025. The schedule of planned activities is listed below.

About the theme of the school in Sofia

How does a community survive and resist? Which memories are celebrated, and which are erased? This program of daily seminars invites participants to explore practices of commemoration and counter-memory.

Through collective, performative and ceremonial gestures we will share tools for remembrance, healing, solidarity, and care. Together we will learn/un-learn how memory can be activated and re-activated as a practice of persistence and forging a community. Participants will bring their own stories, struggles, s/heroes, and places into the dialogue, while also investigating local sites of public gathering. As a point of departure, we will engage with the long-time contested and partially dismantled Monument to the Soviet Army (MSA) in Sofia, as well as with other samples from the public space of Sofia on a ‘need to engage’ basis. We will be unpacking complex historical/memory layers and urgent political collisions while trying to establish a path forward and ‘filters’ for thinking about the future.

Over the decades, the site of MSA has been continuously re-appropriated – repainted, graffitied, turned into a gathering place for protest, celebration, and dissent. From colorful interventions that “casted” Soviet soldiers as Superheroes, to recent clashes around its removal, the monument embodies the ongoing struggle over whose history is preserved and who’s erased. Participants will confront the living tension between official narratives and community practices of memory.

The Sofia monument allows us to ask:
How does public space become a vessel of power and resistance?
What forms of commemoration can challenge imposed histories?
How do we transform monuments of division into spaces of repair and mending?
This local focus will anchor the broader program, connecting Sofia’s political context with global struggles over memory, justice, and repair.

Dates & Times

Workshops:
Monday 27.10 – Friday 31.10 / 18:00–21:00
Saturday 01.11 / 12:00–18:00

Public Presentation:
Saturday 01.11 / 19:00

Language: English

Place: Goethe Institute, Sofia, and TBA

The project Chto Delat. “Against Oblivion: The Rituals of Living Monuments” in Sofia is hosted jointly by the Institute of Contemporary At-Sofia and the Goethe-institut Bulgarien, the main sponsor of the program. 

Text: Institute of Contemporary At-Sofia