The ICAF 2023 Open Invitation is now live!
Dear community artists, thinkers, practitioners, and facilitators.
The next ICAF will be taking place from Wednesday 29 March until Sunday 2 April 2023. We warmly invite you to send in proposals via our application form linked here, for projects, talks, artists, organisations, or anything else that you find fitting, to join the ICAF 2023 programme.
As part of the Open Invitation, we have prepared a small inspiration letter for you to read. So, before getting in contact, please read through the below letter in full to help you gather inspiration and direction for your proposal. Do not feel restricted to respond only with physical projects and proposals, as we are also interested in virtual forms too.
The deadline for applications is the end of ‘your’ day (your time zone) Sunday 28 November 2021.
Please share this invitation with whomever you think may be interested, and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at info@icafrotterdam.com.
We are very excited to receive your proposals.
Best wishes,
Jasmina, Anamaria, and Amy
We are also looking for content for the upcoming ICAF online platform, as well as to broaden our network of future friends and collaborators, so please feel free to reach out to us at info@icafrotterdam.com with any projects and proposals beyond this Open Invitation process.
The sound of change
The time that has passed since the last, planned ICAF of 2020 has caused long-lasting, far-reaching rifts across the globe. For some, it has ground their known realities of before to a halt, offering time for pause and reflection, and a significant change of pace. Yet for many more, this same period has only increased existing hardships, tensions, suffering, precarity, and loss, in forms that will last far beyond the pandemic itself. We have been posed questions that relate individually, societally, organisationally, and within and between our communities, that will be carried with us into the future. In this sense, as Arundhati Roy states, the pandemic presents “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”.
Many people working in community arts in very different contexts around the globe share the belief that inclusive, participatory arts can contribute to positive change, and transformation in the world. Yet this is an ongoing journey of evolution and transition that is not always linear or predictable in its route. Such transformations can be recognised from large scale to small scale, and in both tangible and intangible forms. This said, all great participatory artworks and processes, regardless of their size, scale, or form, require us to think more deeply and richly about how we share and connect within our communities, as well as the ways in which we form knowledge, build bridges, cross borders, and dig for layers of experience, meaning and perspective beyond our own, as part of a shifting axis.
For the next ICAF we are particularly curious to explore how such a complex journey of transition can be encapsulated through the medium of sound. Sound demonstrates as equal an importance for embodying the role of the listener, as it does the speaker. Sound is a communicator, a way of empathising, sharing, and expressing. Sound can be a song, a protest, a chant, or complete silence. It can be opera, music, meditation, clapping, percussion, or symphony. It can be footsteps, traffic, or a voice. It is life in action; felt sensorially and bodily. Sound is a vehicle to bring people and contexts together, to communicate with one another within our communities, and between our communities, and to connect across borders, boundaries, and bridges. Through its many, diverse forms, sound offers the option to whisper or to shout, to activate our voices and tell our stories, or make space through silence for those who are not heard, as we embark upon our journeys of evolution and transition, towards positive change.
For ICAF 2023 we are interested in receiving proposals from community arts projects and organisations that demonstrate an awareness of the power of community arts to affect, enrich and expose us to forms of positive change, and that use sound as an entry point into this creative journey.
ICAF 2023 Open Invitation Application Form: https://forms.gle/mzpxNks5yS5zC7LY8