Thursday, July 21, 2011
FLUID GROUND. A symposium on board of a cargo ship across the Black Sea was organised by Art Today Association Plovdiv and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brandenburg.
July 21 - 23, 2011

On Thursday, July 21, a group of 16 artists, curators, theoreticians and cultural activists from 8 different countries went on board of a ship, connecting the two Black Sea ports of Varna (Bulgaria) and Batumi (Georgia). The program included lectures, presentations and discussions, real-time interventions and documentation.
FLUID GROUND was part of the ATLANTIS network. This initiative fostered crossborder cultural exchange between art professionals through collaborative exhibition projects, residencies for artists and curators, panel discussions, workshops and conferences.
The symposium across the Black Sea was based on the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration, cross-linking artistic practice, knowledge production, research and reflection in this remote and mobile location. The freighter was temporarily be transformed into a thinktank, confronting relevant cultural, artistic, economical, social and political discourses and practices, and blending them together. Thus a journey across the Black Sea offered an adequate platform to examine questions pertaining to Europe’s identity and integrity.

Participants: Inka Thunecke / director Heinrich-Böll-Foundation (Berlin), Karoline Weber / media philosopher (Stuttgart), Ulrike Grelck / art historian (Berlin), Livia Pancu / curator Vector Association (Iasi), Simonetta Ferfoglia, Heinrich Pichler / artist collective "gangart" (Vienna), Nadja Abt / artist (Berlin), Sebastian Bodirsky / filmmaker (Berlin), Anna Soucek / curator (Vienna), Susanna Gyulamiryan / director Arts and Cultural Studies Laboratory (Yerevan), Nino Palavandishvili / curator GeoAIR (Tbilisi), Anastasia Zhivkova / curator (Kiev), Jakob Racek / curator (Plovdiv)

www.atlantisprojects.eu

This project was kindly supported by Goethe-Institute Bulgaria and the Austrian Embassy in Sofia.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.