Xarkis Festival (XF)

Working title: ‘Unearthing care: Ecologies of collaboration.’

True to its nomadic tradition, the 11th Xarkis Festival will move to the old town of Nicosia and will be held from September 13-15th, 2024. It will include an Artist Multi-residency Programme from September 1-12th. For 11 days a group of selected artists are invited to work with our team and the local community, to prepare works that will contribute to the programme of the three-day festival.

Next year's international programme will include gatherings, experiential workshops, exhibitions, participatory installations, interventions, live performances and concerts, interactive games and more, suitable for children and adults of all ages. In Nicosia, the Festival seeks to embed values of care tied to a feminist lens of care, to share and acquire knowledge on collaborative and participatory practices, explore and debunk aspects of the locale and "cypriotness", intangible cultural heritage and craft practices, as well as rituals and vernacular practices through contemporary art forms. The selected artists are invited to collaborate with members of the local communities, within which they will test and experiment with feminist approaches to care in the aforementioned themes.

Xarkis is highly connected and shaped by the environment and communities it is based in each year. Artists in Residence and local community members co-create and focus on issues of interest to them, seeking ways that allow them to manage their representation. Residents are invited to respond to these ideas through a site-specific project developed in our host community. This programme emphasises the human, natural and cultural heritage found in the host community. In this context, each guest is invited to respond to a challenge that explores the theme of the festival.

For this year's open call, we are interested in applications that explore the following questions and sub-themes around the theme of Unearthing care: Ecologies of collaboration.

• Q1: In what ways can socially engaged arts and design practices, guided by a collaborative and feminist lens of care, take shape in the cultural mosaic of Nicosia?
• Q2: How do collaborative practices affect the cultural mosaic of Nicosia?

Sub themes: Ecologies, community practices, more-than-human collaborations, intergenerational practices, cross-species collaborations, DIY and DIT practices, ad hoc practices, feminist critique of knowledge production, rituals of everyday life, communal identities, micro communities, movement and body in care spaces, corporeal practices, meta-products of heritage, alternative technologies of creation, urban collaborations, everyday acts of care, practices of inclusion, rejuvenation of lost or endangered practices, gift economies, intercommunal practices, intercommunal rituals, loss of heritage and globalisation, cultural heritage industry, care practices and inclusive practices, gender dynamics, deconstruction/demystification of cypriotness, the multifaceted texture of cypriotness, multiculturalism of Nicosia, creating through sharing. Moving from the individual to the collective, and at the junction of practices, we suggest a proposal rooted in care as an antidote to carelessness in the cypriot context. The curatorial concept proposes an exploration of the relationship between care and cypriotness, and asks what the possibilities of cypriotness are. What do we tend to care about or not? Who do we tend to extend care to?