FAKI | Open call 2027

30th International festival of alternative theatrical expression - FAKI

Call for artists, activists, researches and theatre critics

Zagreb, Croatia, 24th to 30th May 2027

Deadline: 20th Aug 2026, 23.59 (CET)

Apply here: https://forms.gle/6CaxSoNCReJ2eqxf9

 

Celebration

 

For the 30th edition of the FAKI Festival, we are celebrating more than a festival anniversary. Thirty years of FAKI also marks three decades of the organisation behind it: thirty years of self-organisation, collective work, artistic experimentation, friendships, disagreements, persistence and survival. This milestone invites us to pause, not out of nostalgia, but to ask what it means to celebrate today.

 

What are we celebrating?

 

What deserves celebration in a world marked by ongoing crises, wars, ecological collapse, rising inequalities and political violence? Is celebration an escape from reality, or can it be a way of confronting it? Can celebrating become an act of resistance against cynicism, exhaustion and despair? Can it create space for joy without denying grief?

 

What do we want to celebrate today? What forms can celebration take: poetic? Political? Tender? Brutal? Solitary? Collective? Loud? Quiet? Ritualistic? Improvised? Shared? Introspective? How do we come to terms with the passing of time, with what has been lost, what has endured and what is still waiting to emerge?

 

Celebration is often understood as the culmination of success, the reward after achievement. But what if celebration does not need to be earned? What if we celebrate the process rather than the outcome, the attempt rather than the victory, the gathering rather than the accomplishment? Can celebration exist without consensus? Can it acknowledge contradictions? Can it hold both mourning and hope at once?

 

To celebrate together is to temporarily suspend the logic of productivity. Celebration interrupts the rhythms of efficiency, competition and extraction that shape our everyday lives. It creates time that is not measured by profit or usefulness, but by presence, encounter and shared experience.

 

Throughout history, celebration has been inseparable from political struggle. Festivals, carnivals, occupations, demonstrations, collective rituals and public gatherings have always been spaces where communities imagine different ways of living together. Joy itself can be political. To dance, feast, sing, laugh, rest or gather collectively in times of precarity can become an act of defiance.

 

Celebration asks us not only what we are fighting against, but also what we are fighting for.

 

Performance has always shared something with celebration. Both exist only in the present moment. Both depend on bodies coming together in space and time. Both disappear as soon as they happen, leaving only memories, traces and transformed relationships behind.

 

How can performance create moments worth celebrating? Can celebration itself become a choreographic principle, a dramaturgical structure, a performative gesture? Can celebration be awkward, excessive, intimate, melancholic, absurd? Can it fail? Must every celebration be festive, or can there also be celebrations of vulnerability, survival, care, slowness or quiet persistence?

 

We are interested in works that approach celebration not only as a subject, but also as a method: as a way of making, sharing and experiencing art together.

 

FAKI has existed for thirty years thanks to countless artists, organisers, volunteers, audiences and collaborators who have continuously imagined and sustained spaces for independent performing arts. This anniversary is not simply about looking back at what has been accomplished, but about celebrating the conditions that make collective artistic practice possible and asking how we continue building them.

 

We celebrate those who came before us, those who are here today, and those who will shape what comes next. We celebrate continuity, but also transformation. We celebrate the fragile infrastructures that allow independent culture to exist. Above all, we celebrate the possibility of gathering, creating and imagining together.

 

We invite artists, performers, collectives and practitioners from all disciplines of contemporary performing arts to celebrate with us as part of the 30th FAKI Festival.

 

Bring us works that question celebration, reinvent it, complicate it, embody it or simply make space for it.

 

Let's celebrate together.