Imagining Cities

INFORMAL PRACTICE SHARING
18/19 JULY 2025 IN SOFIA
IN THE FRAME OF NINE ELEPHANTS VOL. 2

Rapid spatial and demographic growth, mass building investment and disappearing centers, administrative withdrawal and poor social infrastructure, frozen democracy and growing isolation, environmental crises and sudden catastrophes – these are some of the issues many large-scale cities face today, whether neoliberal, post-socialist, or part of the Global South and East. Cities are expanding fast, but often in fragmented ways, driven by investment-led urbanism that puts profit before community. Participatory and democratic processes are being eroded, making it all the more urgent to explore alternative, creative ways of reclaiming and reimagining urban space.

Over the past few years, the Center for Social Vision, and since last year the Nine Elephants Festival, both based in Sofia (Bulgaria), have been exploring the contradictions and complexities of urban life – its open structures, informal interactions, and non-discursive relations. Inspired by spontaneous street encounters, informal care networks, everyday activism, and unexpected urban affinities, we support transdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practices that imagine more desirable ways of co-living.

As part of the second edition of Nine Elephants Festival (10-20 July 2025), we invited emerging artists, curators, researchers, and cultural professionals to join Imagining Cities, an open and informal practice-sharing event in Sofia. It’s a space to connect with peers, experts, and colleagues, and to engage in meaningful, in-depth conversations around a shared field of work. We’re interested in situated artistic, cultural, and curatorial practices – including site-specific interventions, public art, social practice, sound, performance, cartography, cultural mediation, architecture, and speculative tools—that open up space for reflection, imagination, and action. We particularly value practices that initiate long-term processes and contribute to broader narratives of change. We invite you to share models, tools, and techniques, which you use to navigate the complex socio-political and cultural landscapes of today’s cities. How you experience, shape, and envision urban space as an open city? How relationships between human and non-human inhabitants evolve, and how it connects to rural, natural, or industrial surroundings, both physical and imagined? We’re especially interested in cultural practices that explore third spaces, poetic infrastructures, metabolic cities, and palimpsest urbanism – just a few of the many possible ways to approach recent urban developments.

The forum is hosted by the Center for Social Vision, an interdisciplinary platform that sees art and culture as part of an expanded field of practice – bringing together diverse disciplines, experiences, and forms of knowledge. Our work connects public and exhibition spaces and is supported by a wide network of practitioners based in Sofia and beyond. Our partner is the Urban Storytelling School, a Sofia- and Berlin-based research initiative  developed together with C*Space Berlin.

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Nine Elephants is supported by the National Culture Fund and Sofia Municipality.
Urban Storytelling School is supported by the National Agency for Education for Europe at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and implemented within the EU Program Erasmus +.