Dear ROAR/Smash community,

After more than a decade of continuous work through SMASH and later ROAR, we are officially closing the program. ROAR 2025 has been cancelled due to too few applications to make the edition viable. This has confirmed something we've been slowly coming to terms with: it’s time to bring this chapter to a close.

Smash, initiated by Alessio Castellacci and Claudia Dietrich, and ROAR later led by Alessio, have always been fully grassroots initiatives, independent of public funding and self-sustained. We’ve run on care, energy, and commitment—from participants, teachers, and everyone behind the scenes. But in the current climate, it has become increasingly difficult to ask for the kind of investment - financial, physical, emotional - that the format demands.

This decision comes after many months of questioning, listening, and trying. We didn’t arrive at it lightly. It feels important to say that this is not a story of failure, but a recognition of the shifting realities around us. The conditions that allowed ROAR to exist have changed, and with them, our sense of what is possible and what is sustainable.

We’re proud of what this program has been: a place for risk, for research, for embodied thinking and deep unlearning. Over the past 10+ years, hundreds of artists have passed through this space, and we know the traces it has left are many and meaningful.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of it, for showing up, for holding the space, and for shaping it.

That was ROAR.

As a closing gesture, we’d like to invite everyone who has been involved with the program - participants, teachers, collaborators, friends - to leave a note, a message, or a photo on the ROAR board of love. We’d love to gather these as a way to mark what this space has meant to so many.

Join us in celebrating what ROAR has been, and in closing it with love.

your ROAR team.

ROAR 2025 MODULES

Photos: Robyn Jordan, shannon stewart, Stella Horta, Nina Djurdjevic, Adam Carey.