The Educational programme “Without Distance” 2025 is part of the project „Life Long Burning – Future Lost and Found (LLB 3) and is realized with the financial support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, National Culture Fund, programme “Creative Europe”, and in partnership with Goethe-Institut Bulgarien.
Can art resist? And if yes, to what? How? And why?
Twenty years ago I argued: art, the act of creation, is itself resistance. Today, in an age of collapse of the model of the world in which such a thesis was affirmed, we must ask the metacritical question: has art failed? Have all projects that sought to change the world, to overcome limitations, inequalities and global injustice, failed? Or on the contrary, beyond melancholic apocalyptic tendencies, should we argue that the resistance of creation has yet to bear fruit?
The lecture will draw diverse and unusual examples from the field of contemporary art, with a focus on contemporary dance.
Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and writer, Professor at New Bulgarian University and Visiting Professor at Berlin University of the Arts and Hollins University.
Manchev is the author of twenty books, among which Metamorphosis, the World (with Jean-Luc Nancy, 2024) World and Freedom (2023), What is Ontology? (with Dimitar Vatsov, 2023), The End of Contemporary Art?, or The Future of Art (2023), and The Body–Metamorphosis (2007). He has also contributed as author, theorist, dramaturge, actor or curator to visual arts, theatre, cinema and contemporary dance projects. Together with Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev, he is a founding member of the artistic collective Metheor.
“Without Distance” is the educational platform of “Antistatic” festival, which aim is to stimulate professional skills in the field of contemporary dance and performance, meetings and contacts between colleagues, as well as to provoke artists to new meanings and expression.
The content of the platform is a reflection of the theme of the festival and in 2025 completely immerses in different aspects of resistance, following the motto “Signs of Resistance”.