THE SYN(ES)THESIS PROJECT – A MULTI-PURPOSE EXPERIMENT IN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS

In the spring of 2021, the “Pancho Vladigerov” House Museum in Sofia brought to life a new creative initiative that aimed to simultaneously enlarge the scope of the museum’s activities, open up new artistic paths, and allow for an innovative approach to the cultivation of a wider audience base given the ongoing pandemic at the time. In April of the same year, the SYN(es)THESIS Project was officially introduced to the public through its inaugural concert exhibition; since then, it has involved the partnership and support of no less than twelve institutions in Bulgaria and has culminated in three complete annual editions with multiple events and components. Three years later, with a remarkable array of creative results in several artistic fields, the project presents the intriguing tale of an original interdisciplinary experiment. This paper invites a closer look into its structure and organization, its participants' compelling and inspired productions, and its potential for further expansion into new creative territories following its main established principles. In its essence, the SYN(es)THESIS Project aims to explore the multitude of possibilities for synthesis, interactions, and interconnections between the various arts through inspired individual and group-coordinated creative work. As such, it is meant to build bridges, often in unexpected ways, between artists, artistic disciplines, and institutions at multiple levels, even between the educational and professional spheres and their respective audiences. To foster the above goals, the project employs an array of creative approaches that, as its very name suggests, allow for manifold combinations and artistic interpretations. In practice, the root words “SYN” (Greek, “together”), “THESIS” (“statement”), “aesthesh” (“feeling”), and “SYNTHESIS” all have a certain relationship to its main guiding principles; and, while the number of these morphemes is fixed, the project does provide an open framework in which the potential directions for artistic work can, at least in theory, be limited only by one’s imagination and the specific relationships between the various creative mediums. In this regard, the project encompasses a rather open general format; concurrently, with every new session, all possibilities are narrowed down to specific combinations of artistic activities. This consequently allows for a clear, yet ever-evolving structure to be re-established as the basis for creative work.