Water Tower Art Fest — 20 Years
An Invitation to Contribute to a Shared Future
(Closed Curatorial Call – Selected Artists & Alumni)
Sofia | June 2026 – ongoing
Water Tower Art Fest (WTAF) marks its 20th anniversary not as a celebration of endurance alone, but as a moment of collective reckoning and projection. This invitation is extended to a selected circle of artists, curators, and cultural practitioners—many of whom have shaped the festival over the years, and others whose practices resonate deeply with its ethos—to contribute intellectually and conceptually to this milestone.
This is not an open call, nor a request for finished artworks. It is an invitation to think with us, to write, reflect, speculate, and position yourselves alongside a community that has grown across decades, geographies, and contexts of instability.
Why This Invitation, Now
We are living through a time marked by accelerating political polarisation, ecological collapse, economic extraction, and the re-emergence of new empires built on fragile foundations: greed disguised as growth, nationalism masked as identity, hedonism sold as freedom, and power sustained through the erosion of empathy.
The systems that shape our present are increasingly incapable of imagining a livable future. Art, too, is under pressure—instrumentalised, neutralised, regulated, or absorbed into market logic. Independent spaces disappear, residencies are forced to justify themselves through productivity metrics, and artistic risk is reframed as institutional liability.
Yet it is precisely in such times that art must refuse immediacy, refuse compliance with the here-and-now, and insist on longer temporalities, deeper solidarities, and alternative value systems.
Water Tower Art Fest has always existed slightly out of time—working in abandoned infrastructures, peripheral geographies, and spaces between past function and future possibility. After 20 years, we recognise this position not as marginal, but as necessary.
A Community Across Time
Since 2006, WTAF has functioned as a living, evolving ecosystem rather than a fixed institution. Its community is not defined by nationality, discipline, or style, but by a shared commitment to:
- working with place as an active agent, not a backdrop
- engaging ethically with communities and local realities
- embracing uncertainty, vulnerability, and risk as artistic values
- resisting extractive, short-term cultural models
- and sustaining long-term relationships beyond single projects
This invitation acknowledges your role—past, present, or potential—within this ecosystem. It asks: what does it mean to belong to an artistic community over time, especially when the world around us grows increasingly fragmented?
What We Are Inviting You to Contribute
We invite you to contribute a textual or conceptual position that responds to the following shared horizon:
How can artistic communities imagine and work toward futures that are politically conscious, economically just, ecologically sustainable, and socially empathetic—beyond the dominant systems we currently inhabit?
Your contribution may take the form of:
- a short essay or manifesto
- a speculative or poetic text
- a critical reflection grounded in your practice
- a proposal for alternative social, ecological, or cultural strategies
- a collective or dialogical text developed with others
- a reflection on failure, exhaustion, refusal, or withdrawal as political acts
We are not seeking consensus. We are seeking clarity of position, generosity of thought, and the courage to articulate directions that may feel distant from the present moment—but necessary for survival.
Shared Values, Not Shared Answers
This invitation is grounded in a set of values that have shaped WTAF across two decades:
- Gift economy over extraction
- Shared resources over accumulation
- Care over competition
- Ecological interdependence over human exceptionalism
- Long-term cultural processes over short-term visibility
We recognise that these values are increasingly at odds with dominant political and economic narratives. That is precisely why we insist on them—not as ideology, but as practice.
Your contribution may affirm, challenge, complicate, or reframe these values. What matters is that it participates in a collective effort to articulate direction, rather than merely diagnose collapse.
From Forum to Archive to Future
Selected contributions will become part of:
- the WTAF 20th Anniversary Symposium & Forum (June 2026, Sofia), where texts and positions may be read, discussed, or activated through conversation;
- and the 20-Year Anniversary Publication, conceived not as a retrospective catalogue, but as a future-facing archive—a document of shared thinking in a time of profound uncertainty.
This publication will stand as a record of how an international artistic community chose to speak, imagine, and take responsibility at a historical turning point.
A Continuing Commitment
This invitation should be understood as part of an ongoing relationship, not a one-time gesture. Water Tower Art Fest remains committed to slow cultural work, long-term collaboration, and sustained dialogue across borders and differences.
By contributing, you are not endorsing a fixed programme or institution. You are participating in a collective attempt to remain human, imaginative, and responsible within systems that increasingly discourage all three.
In Closing
We believe that art still matters—not because it entertains, decorates, or distracts, but because it can hold complexity, nurture empathy, and imagine futures where other systems of living are possible.
After 20 years, Water Tower Art Fest continues to ask:
- What is worth sustaining?
- What must be transformed?
- And how do we do this together, without illusion—but also without surrender?
We invite you to think with us.
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Water Tower Art Fest (WTAF)
20th Anniversary Programme
Association IME | Sofia
June 2026 – ongoing
We must not follow doctrines blindly or submit to false authority; we must lead by example and defend our principles.
Soon more info on places, people, art and things!
