We welcome you to two days of informal practice sharing in Sofia on 18 and 19 July! Activities will be conducted at the art space Swimming Pool (10 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd, 5th floor) and surroundings.

Imagining Cities is within the frame of the Nine Elephants festival and its second edition. It is open to everyone interested in urban art practices. Due to limited capacity please register here (registration closed).

Info to the open call for Imagining Cities you can find here.

Friday, July 18

09:00-10:00 Registration
Location: Swimming Pool

10:00-11:00 Panel 1: Welcome & Urban Storytelling School (USS)
Introduction to the Nine Elephants Festival by Viktoria Draganova and Anna Ivanova & introduction to Urban Storytelling School by Katya Romanova.

ZEHN / Десет – Chain Travel Card by Maria Fallada & Ksenia Porechina @ USS
A participatory project by Ksenia Lapina and Maria Fallada Llandrich linking youth in Berlin and Sofia along tramline 10 through portraits, question chains, and a collaborative zine exploring identity and belonging.

Invitation to Recipes for the Future by Elena Balabanska, Eleonora Edreva and Izabela Markova @ USS & The Shiny Sexy: Heterotopias in Student Town by Asya Petkova, Maria Getova and Ana-Maria Molnar @USS, part of the official Nine Elephants Programme

Short break

11:00-12:00 Panel 2: Walking and Memory in Urban Space
Using walking and sensory engagement to reclaim, remember, and reimagine city spaces

11:00 – 11:30 Finding home by Charlotte Kachelmann, Jamie McGhee, Guglielmo Sandri Giachino, Sofie Kirkegaard @ USS
Finding Home is a sound installation exploring what “home” means to young Berliners with migration backgrounds through recorded voices and symbolic objects housed in moving boxes.

11:30-11:45 Vilyana Milanova Milanova (present)
Artist exploring intimacy, empathy, and emotional memory through tactile installations and sound; she will talk about а felting and listening workshop that connects bodily presence with emotional processing and care.

11:45-12:00 Ahmad Alaqra (online)
Presentation about participatory photography walks to reclaim urban space through collective observation and informal, anti-monumental spatial critique.

Discussion

12:30–14:00 Lunch Break (self-organized)

14:00-14:50 Ginevra Ludovici and Flavio Michele – performance-lecture (online)
Location: Swimming Pool

Curator and sound artist fusing philosophy, history, and poetic text in an immersive performance about place and European identity; they will present Audiotext, a sound-lecture engaging with the island of Ventotene (Italy) and Sofia’s layers through voice, archives, and soundscape.

15:00 – 18:00 Walk Session: Concept presentations & practical exercises
At Swimming Pool and outside

Desislava Petkova & Andrea Yuliy Dragov (present)
Sensory walking as a method of urban exploration. Site-specific performers and movement artists who will share techniques in pairs for exploring a familiar or unknown cityscape through different senses beyond words and sight.

Edanur Seçim (present)
Performer and researcher framing daily urban life as performance; Edanur will conduct a walkshop combining observation, writing, and storytelling that culminates in the creation of collaborative zines.

Angela Ka Ki Lee, Studio HAAU & Cherry Cheung (present)
Multidisciplinary architect and professor Angela Lee presents COUNTERFLOW, a curatorial research exploring invisible infrastructures : Participants will trace informal paths and non-human interventions that resist systemic flows—shifting from speed to slowness, control to care, and fostering shared presence and regeneration.

Anna Laganovska (present)
Curator working site-specifically in urban parks using walking as methodology to explore memory, absence, and publicness; she will lead a collaborative walk that uncovers the social and emotional layers of a specific green space.

19:00-21:00 The Shiny Sexy: Heterotopias in Student Town by Asya Petkova, Maria Getova and Ana-Maria Molnar @ USS & part of the official Nine Elephants Programme
Location: Students’ Town, in front of Albertino Kindergarden (Baku St 3) (google maps)

A walk in Students City from palace to palace through the daily routes of its inhabitants, accompanied by collages with real and imaginary visions of the neighbourhood.

Saturday, July 19

10:00–11:00 Panel 3: Architecture, Restoration and Community
At Swimming Pool

10:00-10:15 Caroline Tesner (online)
Explores how public cultural institutions engage with diverse urban audiences, particularly in peripheral or informal contexts, focusing on accessibility, audience behavior, and the tension between curated and spontaneous use.

10:15-10:30 Mihaela Ion (present)
Maps how Romanian artists and curators transform urban space by integrating contemporary art into non-traditional venues, fostering dialogue, identity, and new community dynamics.

10:30-10:45 Dimitar Nikolov (present)
Sculptor focusing on embodied, sensory, and narrative modes of contact; he will offer a situational engagement session exploring different ways of relating to objects, stories, and viewers through presence.

Discussion

11:00–12:00 Panel 4: Speculative Urban Futures and Spatial Systems
Imagining new spatial systems, ephemeral installations, and sonic/temporal commons

11:00-11:40 Collaborative Documentary Workshop, tutored by Iben Ravn
Leads collaborative documentary workshops that use poetic, low-tech storytelling to co-create urban visual archives through collective authorship and experimental editing, which is taking place at the Cinema Society of the National and Capodistrian University of Athens. In its first semester, six student-directors teams have completed short films that will be presented: Natasa Agelaki, Vereniki Nanou, Panaiotis Tsaousis, Sokratis Kozobolis & Eirini Skiathiti, Art Lubinskiy, Katerina Evagelou, Nikos Goulas..

11:40-11:55 Ivan Sanchez Alva (online)
Through speculative cartography and architectural theory, Lunar Palimpsest reflects on the Moon as a layered site of urban imaginaries and planetary justice, drawing parallels with Earth’s fragmented urban geographies.

Discussion and short break

12:00-13:00 Navigating TikTok as a City with freakygreenfish
This presentation introduces media ecology theory for understanding digital cultures through FrameTokCity, a conceptual framework and visual art project that materializes TikTok’s infrastructure as an explorable CGI cityscape. The session includes a workshop where participants map their algorithmic neighborhoods.

13:00-14:00 – Lunch Break (self-organized) with Hristo Kaloyanov
Location: Lira Gallery, 45 Gurko St (google maps)
Hristo investigates the architectural, historical, and curatorial role of Lira Gallery as a case study in how artistic interventions can activate neglected urban spaces and civic imagination.

14:00-16:00 – Parallel workshop sessions
Starting at Swimming Pool

Kosara Keskinova
Inspired by Dear Data, this workshop uses hand-drawn data as a poetic tool for personal urban storytelling, inviting participants to create visual postcards based on self-tracked experiences of Sofia.

Charlotte Coosemans, Remixing Neighbourhoods
The workshop offers insight into a method of visual storytelling based on photography. Inspired by the concept of “remixed identities” which means that in contemporary society we shape our identities by remixing various cultural references, I want to propose this tool to give voice to the diverse perspectives present in neighbourhoods. An invitation to deep listening, the tool fosters dialogue and imagination, aiming to co-design a living environment which includes everyone.

16:00-17:00 From the Ruins with Haoyue Chen
Based on the ideas of palimpsest, a medieval manuscript with traces of past writings, the workshop would utilise tracing paper and standard white model clay as the original material, for participants to reprint, recreate, reimagine the past existence of urban debris, inviting strangers to become stewards of public imagination, formulating social-spatial experimentations.

17:00 – 18:00 Informal reflection and closing discussion

Location: Swimming Pool

19:00-21:00 Recipes for the Future @ USS and part of the official programme of Urban Storytelling School
Location: West Park (google maps)
Recipes for the Future is a project that gathers voices, imaginations, and ideas of young people along the route of Tram No. 10 — a real and symbolic connection between diverse neighborhoods and communities. The project aims to bring together individual visions and create a collective recipe for a shared future.

Sunday, July 20

10:00-12:00 Brunch in Druzhba with Maria Minkova at “Weaving Druzhba” Installation
Location: The flower houses at the lake of Druzhba (google maps)

20:00-20:00 Join us for Someone, Somewhere, Here by Maria Makedonska and Nikola Zambelli in Buchovo – a poetic encounter in the periphery of Sofia and finale of the Nine Elephants Festival.

Location: Buhovo (google maps)