Curatorial Call Out:
Utopias & Uprisings

16 January 2020

In 2020, Fringe are going all in on you. Artists, your tenacity astounds, your luminosity inspires, your insight leads. You are the architects of the next decade. In a world where we’re forced to dream of functionality, it’s time to find the function in dreams. We trust your visions, and we’ve stockpiled for their realisation. We need seers and smiths of all kinds: Radicals, tell us what the beginning looks like. Thinkers, take us beyond the real. Designers, show us what you see. Messers, keep her lit. You prophesise, we’ll strategise. 
 

Burn it down or build it, it’s utopia or bust.

Utopias aren’t found, they’re built. Unfurl the blueprints and craft yours: tiny and mighty, cavernous and breath-taking, raucous and filthy, discordant and curious, glittering and gentle. Utopias are multitudinous, each one a portal to limitless potential. Overwhelm us. Dissolve boundaries and find strength in variance. Hard hats and hard graft – we’ll all chip in. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. Let solidarity be your scaffold.
 
Bring us uprisings. Take a sledgehammer to hegemonies and make space for what’s next. Act up, act out, unify – join the heroes who’ve been at it for decades. Fight for the future, amplify empathy and practice radical kindness. Let’s occupy space, digital, cultural, concrete; pervade the far channels of the dark web, rewrite mythologies and reimagine the city together. Don’t worry about the blackouts or blank spaces left behind – we’ll follow the torchlight of your undeniable ideas.
 
Joy is an energy – fuel up. We’re thirsty for revolutionary acts of wildness and play. Create manifestos for mischief. Draw on the walls of the city. Incite epiphany inducing laughs. Conjure cathartic dancefloors, the kind of party worth rearranging your year for. Gift us glimpses of beauty and shivers of awe. Make our hearts sing on the Luas home. Lift the city on the magnificent swell of hope you create when you unleash your artistic powers.
 
Dublin Fringe Festival is sending out a homing signal for visionaries, hustlers, experts, virtuosos, whizz-kids, master craftswomen, high nerds, deep weirdos, rabble-rousers, soft boys, cynics, soothsayers, craic czars, prinxes, culchie queens, messy bitches, bog witches and big mouths everywhere. Make it homegrown, make it beautiful, make it right now.
 
Art is a power tool. Start digging.
 
- Ruth McGowan, Festival Director and Bee Sparks, Artistic Projects Manager

 

 Yours is the lead we want to follow. Show us the way with:

  • Radical and unapologetic work. Risk it. Your most fierce, most courageous projects can find a home at Fringe. 
  • A focus on the now and the next. We’re a festival of firsts supporting new thought, innovative practice and fresh ideas. No cover versions, please.
  • Form-busting, genre-defying, game-changing approaches to art-making. Make something that’s never been seen before.
  • Rigour. We value your expertise, and your craft gets our pulses racing. Less clickbait, more long read - put your skills on show.
  • Voices that defy the mainstream. Make the work you’ve been longing to see. Take the mic; you’re the one we’ve been waiting for.
  • JOY. We are true believers in craic for craic’s sake.
  • Big femme energy & soft power. Do things your way. Leave the patriarchy in the dust. Your ideas won’t wait - floor it.
  • Art as activism, as intervention, as agent for change. Art that propels the conversation forward and stakes a claim. 

Here is what you can count on from us:  

  • Unwavering commitment to new work and new voices. Fringe has got your back.
  • Their too risky is our just right. Be ambitious - we’ll take the leap together.
  • Acts of representation and investment in voices that defy the mainstream.
  • Support for contemporary projects from across all artistic disciplines – inventors and mavericks welcome.
  • We’re game if you are. We know that site-specific, unusual and underground spaces can be hard to access, so let’s put our heads together. Fringe can help to open those doors.
  • The Fringe team have decades of experience of getting shows on the road. We are experts in turning plans into action and making stuff happen. Talking to you about your big ideas is both our 9 – 5 and our favourite thing.
  • We want to meet you! Our door is always open, so drop us a line and pop in to say hi. We’re here at Fringe HQ in Temple Bar year-round. 

 

View APPLICATION FORM (click here). 

View APPLICATION GUIDE (click here). 

View DUETS APPLICATION FORM (click here). 

View DUETS APPLICATION GUIDE (click here). 

 

Deadline for applications is Thursday 5th March at 5pm.

Deadline for DUETS applications Friday 21st February at 5pm.