Brief description of the project

Project background
It was in 1999, when OPNN a group of young artists in cooperation with USIT COLOURS - an agency for student and youth travel, started the organization of the so called “Sky Parties” – events, which aim at presenting Bulgarian visual arts and music, in different places around the city of Sofia. The Sky Parties soon became very popular and favorite among the young people in the capital. This idea was further developed to produce a club-exposition of 30 photos, which were the portraits of some of those young people, who had visited the series of Sky Parties. The Millenium Calendar “ID 2000”, consisting of 12 of the best photos, was an expression of the spirit and identity of Bulgaria’s young generation, standing at the threshold of the new millenium.

These portraits formed later on a unique party-club exhibition as well as street exhibition on the huge windows displays of Usit Colours.

Brief description
Destination Bulgaria is a travelling gallery, uniting the works of young Bulgarian artists, working in the field of contemporary visual arts: multimedia, video, photography, slides, net-art. Destination Bulgaria is an opportunity for young artists to honestly express themselves, and a means to a self-definition. Destination Bulgaria is a way to attract more attention to the place, where they live, and to the way they think, by providing a new type of communication among the people – the visual arts.

Multimedia installations, TV screens, projectors, slide-projectors, monitors, cameras, night window screenings and sounds presented in not-traditional galleries – the offices of the student and youth travel agency “Usit”. The Usit offices are situated in major communicational, trade, and central places in European capitals: London, Madrid, Brussels, Dublin. A huge amount of potential audience - young travelers pass every day trough these spacious locations. There is no other more affordable and non-limited chance for the young artists to show their art, and provoke their audience: the travelling young generation around the world, in order to create sensibility and let young people accept world diversity, the informational, cultural, spiritual, and social revelation, exchange and identification.

Project Goals and Objectives
Together with the turning of Bulgaria towards the rest of the world in a political and economic sense, the Bulgarian art and life-style reached new dimensions. The Bulgarian young artists are facing one and the same questions: Where are we positioned in the world that suddenly started changing so rapidly? What is the place of our country in the context of the world that started opening to us? What are the sounds and the images that suddenly flooded our public space? What are the sounds we hear, and the images we see? Bulgarian artists have to respond to this new reality and their response is their art, which reveals their self- identification and unique approach. Their art is their contribution to the world richness, bonding the world’s diversity.

Destination Bulgaria project will contribute to the general process of connecting activities in not only one field, but in different fields like the business and the art non profit sector, thus creating conditions for recognition of each others and benefiting from each others strengths. Creating these links Destination Bulgaria finds an alternative, corresponding to the future European and world tendencies communication, delivering message from a source of one kind directly to and audience of the same kind, finding these audience in alternative spaces, thus overcoming the rigidity and the low flexibility of the currently existing static gallery spaces. The project contributes for the popularization and development of the new media arts by giving a deeper and more comprehensive understanding and an example for their flexible, mobile and accessible nature and researches new approaches in the presentation of the contemporary visual arts.

In this way Destination Bulgaria creates a new channel offering more direct and fast media access for artists. The existing creative potential, is currently much bigger than the limits of the existing media channels.

The links created by the project will be sustained and even strengthen by transferring the project from the local-international level of integration to a cross-international level.

This project could be institutionalized by transforming the existing travel outlets into real media channels giving access to the wide cultural world diversity being exhibited in these travel galleries around the world. This project could initiate a series of permanently traveling exhibitions in Europe presenting contemporary visual arts from different European countries.

Destination Bulgaria broadens the context of the Bulgarian artists trough showing their art works in Europe.

The project aims at visualizing the dreams of the generation of artists, whose active life began during the last 11 years. During that period every one of them had to define his special place as both an artist and a personality. The MTV, the Postmodernism, the new galleries, the www, the net-art, the travelling, the private funding, the international exchange – it was a whole new range of opportunities for everybody to find his way.

Destination Bulgaria aims at showing the little known face of Bulgaria, as seen through the eyes of artists of the young generation, through their visualized messages towards the travelling people of their age, their way of living and interests.

Destination Bulgaria is a territory in which the Bulgarian young artists will find their own identity as national, European, and universal personalities.

Expected Results

• Popularizing Bulgarian art and culture
  
• Presenting art works of Bulgarian young artists abroad.
  
• Involving wider and most appropriate audience-young world travelers.
  
• World access of Bulgarian art trough alternative media channel-international network.
  
• Generating new kind of interactive communication trough contemporary visual arts
  
• Visualization of the atmosphere, culture, spirit, strength and sensibility of the creative young generation in Bulgaria.
  
• Creating an integral document, a reflection of this generation towards itself, towards the time and place, they live in.

Partner Organizations Usit Colours – SofiaUsit Colours is part of the international chain of Usit World specialising in student and youth traveling. Each year Usit Colours helps thousands of young independand Bulgarian travelers to discover the world-travel see, undestand, learn, grow, form their spirit and identityBulgarian Photographic AssociationThe main aims of BPA are to help national artists in creating and presenting their work as well as to break the isolation of Bulgarian photography and visual arts, establishing numerous contacts with institutions and personalities abroad and developing international projectsUsit WorldWith its 233 owned and affiliated offices in 65 countries Usit World helped 1.7 Million young people travel around the world.The role of Usit World in the project is that the company will help overcoming the limitation of the ordinary exhibition gallery spaces trough offering its own central communicative centers and guaranteed clientele-audience for the benefit of the art.Usit World helps transforming the existing meaning of travel trough defining it as “The Art of Travel” relocating the physical travel after the cultural travel starting with the direct access to the world cultural diversity in the travel outlets trough multimedia exhibitions and installation Soros Center for the Arts SCA has strong experience in encouraging the establishment of new conditions for the development of Bulgarian arts and culture. Its main characteristics are the elimination of the state monopoly and cultural protectionism, the breaking up of mechanisms inherited from the totalitarian model, as well as the achievement of decentralisation in cultural life. These new conditions are also characterised by the need to overcome personal isolation which leads to the marginalisation of cultural practitioners, the necessity to acquire knowledge and skills to overcome financial instability and by the need for further professional development and relevant public presence.The Soros Center for the Arts will contribute to the project financially, as well as will play the consultant and advice role.