Bled Contemporary Music Week presents
The New Symposium
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ONE-YEAR ONLINE RESIDENCY PROGRAM & PORTFOLIO DIALOGUES
[November 2026 – November 2027]
– One-Year Online Residencies: A weekly forum for artistic research, critical exchange, and the collective development of ideas, methods, visions, and works.
– Portfolio Dialogues: Distinguished composers and performers are invited to unfold a body of work in sustained conversation with selected cohorts of young and emerging practitioners.
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PROGRAMME AT A GLANCE
Programme period: November 2026–November 2027
Residency format: Weekly online forum
Portfolio Dialogues Format: Online sessions
Application deadline: October 31, 2026
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Introducing:
ARTISTIC PRACTICE AS A FORM OF INTELLIGENCE
Artistic practice produces more than works: it organizes ways of sensing, testing, learning, and relating. Yet artistic life is often structured around presentation, evaluation, and completion. The New Symposium attends to what these formats tend to compress or leave unresolved: formation, uncertainty, methodological reflection, revision, and return.
Its two principal formats operate at complementary temporal scales. Portfolio Dialogues reopen established bodies of work; One-Year Online Residencies remain with practices in formation long enough for their questions to change.
Together, they create the sustained time and critical structure within which completed works can be reconsidered, unfinished projects can acquire sharper definition, and practitioners can encounter perspectives their existing methods may not disclose.
The word “new” does not promise novelty for its own sake. It marks an effort to renew the symposium as a social and intellectual form: a durable setting in which artistic understanding is articulated, tested, and transformed through attention, demonstration, comparison, disagreement, and return.
The New Symposium does not require artistic practice to become wholly explicable. It brings decisions, assumptions, and consequences under examination without presuming that the embodied, tacit, speculative, or unresolved dimensions of a practice can—or should—be exhausted by explanation.
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PROGRAMMES
One-Year Online Residencies
Program period: November 2026–November 2027 (12 months)
Weekly meetings: Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays
Format: Participant-led presentations, facilitated critical sessions, seminars, laboratories, and collective discussions
Location: Online
Cohort: 50 participants
Membership fee: 100 EUR per month
Working language: English
Application deadline: October 31, 2026
Portfolio Dialogues
Program period: November 2026–November 2027 (12 months)
Dialogue dates: Each Portfolio Dialogue is individually scheduled
Format: Presentation by selected guest, moderated Q&A, and collective discussions
Location: Online
Cohort: 50 participants
Participation fee: free
Working language: English
Application deadline: to be announced soon
DATES
COORDINATORS
APPLICATION FORMS AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Symposium program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io