INFORMAL PRACTICE SHARING
18/19 JULY 2025 IN SOFIA
IN THE FRAME OF NINE ELEPHANTS VOL. 2
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. As part of the second edition of the festival in 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.
For the first edition of the forum we were particularly value practices that initiate long-term processes and contribute to broader narratives of change. We invited artists, curators, researchers, urbanists and cultural practitioners 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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With the financial support of the Culture Programme of the Sofia Municipality, Strand 9: “Development of Cultural Organisations and Artists in Sofia”, National Culture Fund.
Urban Storytelling School is financially supported by the National Agency for Education for Europe at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and implemented within the EU Program Erasmus +.
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Spontaneous Cities – Open Call
informal practice-sharing gathering that brings together artists, curators, researchers, and practitioners to exchange ideas on urban spontaneity, adaptation, and collective life.
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Imagining Cities – Report
We’re excited to share some highlights from the two-day symposium Imagining Cities that took place on 18–19 July 2025 in Sofia.
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Imagining Cities – Full Programme
The full programme of the symposium is online now.
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Imagining Cities – Open Call
We invite emerging artists, curators, researchers, and cultural professionals to join Imagining Cities, an open and informal practice-sharing event in Sofia.