For the 5th sequent year Æther Sofia invites you to take part in an open dialogue, a visual and discursive tale of narratives, angles and perspectives, a woven spider net operating system, addressing the banality of evil and spreading the importance of politics of care.
In its 2022 edition, RE-SPIRIT / TRANS-SPIRIT is seen as a collective attempt to bring forth urgent issues and topics as one fertile piece of soil rather than fragmented polluted waste-grounds. It invites connections to flow and undercurrents, it creates unexpected movements, and amplifies motives that make one organism vital and strong. It wants to trigger the importance of collective thinking, to wake up the unconscious, while gaining new skills and language to surge the residues of political, social, economic, and human injustices, when needed most – TODAY!
We see the present political instability as a possibility to fuel the city of Sofia with a platform that unfolds as a gift and provides a possibility to share and openly discuss the current state of affairs, locally as well as globally.
We argue that we urgently need a policy that puts care first and foremost. By care, we not only mean ‘hands-on’ care, or the work people do when looking after the physical and emotional needs to others – this is obviously critical and urgent as this dimension of caring remains. However, ‘care’ is also understood as a social capacity and activity that includes the care of everything necessary for the well-being and flourishing of life.
To put care center stage means to recognize and embrace our interdependencies. In this collective manifesto, we use the term 'care' generously to embrace family and community care, activate cooperative alternatives and create solidarity economies. ‘Care’ becomes our collective and individual capacity to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that enable the vast majority of people and living beings on this planet to thrive, along with the planet itself. With this approach, we want to understand care as active and necessary on every scale of life.
