{"id":9941,"date":"2026-01-09T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devetslona.art\/open-call\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T10:25:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T10:25:46","slug":"open-call","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/devetslona.art\/en\/open-call\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Call"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Open Call
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Nine Elephants Vol. 3 <\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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For the third consecutive year, Nine Elephants \u2013 a festival for art in urban environments \u2013 invites artists, curators, researchers, urban planners and interdisciplinary practitioners to contribute projects to this year\u2019s edition of the festival, which will take place between 9 and 19 July 2026 in Sofia and its periphery.<\/p>\n

For the new edition, we follow the festival\u2019s original impulse to develop and present artistic and interdisciplinary practices in a decentralized way across different locations in the city\u2014within neighborhoods, along streets, in parks, and in informal or liminal spaces\u2014mapping new ways of coexistence, perception, and storytelling of the city.  At the same time, inspired by the mass protests at the end of the past year, in 2026<\/span> <\/span>Nine Elephants will focus on the city as a living, changing body \u2013 ecological, emotional, remembering and collective. <\/span> \u0422he recent protests have shown us the takeover of streets and squares that were until recently unrecognized as places of free expression, and the return of people to public space. These moments are perceived not only politically, but also as spatial, bodily and emotional phenomena. <\/span><\/p>\n

Through this open call, we welcome proposals for projects and practices that expand the imagination for individual and collective life in the city \u2013 through storytelling, listening, corporeality, memory, ecology and speculation. What is that fantastic collective body of the city that periodically comes together, disintegrates, and reemerges \u2013 most clearly in moments of political and social intensity that will mark 2026?

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Themes embedded in the curatorial concept, to which project proposals may relate, though they are not mandatory:<\/p>

  1. Circulation and metabolism – to think of the city as a flow of bodies, information, waste, energy and emotions; moments of overflow, interruption or stasis.<\/li>
  2. Proximity, solidarity and exchange – exploring how we meet, exchange, coexist and help each other in the city – outside formal institutions and market logics. To look for the micro-movements that keep the city alive. <\/li>
  3. The collective body – public gatherings, formal or informal, protests, assemblies, occupation of space; democracy as bodily and spatial practice.<\/li>
  4. Emotionality and affect in the city – urban atmospheres and emotional infrastructures following fear, care, anger, joy, fatigue, solidarity.<\/li>
  5. Misinformation, silence and political apathy – competing narratives, erasure and distortion; practices of listening, stalling and spontaneous conversation in public space.<\/li>
  6. Memory, traces and urban storytelling – how cities remember and forget; the post-socialist city; personal and collective histories; material and immaterial traces; narrative as a form of urban knowledge.<\/li>
  7. Wild urbanism – nature between the wild and the controlled; informal ecologies; spontaneous vegetation; ecological poetics.<\/li>
  8. Care and maintenance – spatial and social attention to infrastructure, green spaces, inter-block areas, buildings and communities, as well as the rituals, efforts and practices that make the city livable, sustainable and compassionate.<\/li><\/ol>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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    Important dates<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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