Uroboros
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
UroborosUroboros is a festival and a community network for collective explorations of the potential of creative practice to support sustainable societal transitions. Uroboros contributors engage in a multitude of co-creative events to reflect on eco-social issues, imagine desirable futures, and prototype sustainable alternatives. The Uroboros aims to help build participants' capacities to better understand eco-social challenges and empower them to become active agents of positive change.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
The Uroboros festival and community network provide an open, hybrid (online/offline) co-creative space for experimental explorations of the transformative potential of creative practice in art and design. In 2020 and 2021, the Uroboros project brought together over 1500 artists, designers, researchers, activists and enthusiasts interested in experimenting with plausible pathways to eco-social transformation, exploring topics such as the circular economy, multi-species collectivism, more-than-human care, sustainable cities, and social aspects of artificial intelligence. These areas of interest were brought to world-wide audiences through a plethora of co-creative events, including workshops, performative experiments, Live Action Role Plays (LARPs), and panel discussions. The Uroboros project was initiated in 2019 by a group of designers, researchers and curators based in Prague (CZ) and officially released in May 2020 along with the inaugural Uroboros festival. The first festival edition was organised mostly online (Covid-19 restrictions) and involved contributions from 43 artists and over 600 participants from across the world. Building on the success of the inaugural festival, the 2021 Uroboros edition offered an extended fourteen-day program of both online and face-to-face events that engaged a global pool of 1000 creative practitioners. Motivated by such outstanding interest in the festival and its leading theme Designing in Troubling Times, the Uroboros grew into a long-term project with community-building ambitions. This shift is supported by various collateral events and activities running throughout the year, including the Uroboros Bites series (https://uroboros.design/uroboros-bites/); exhibitions in the DOX gallery, Prague; an open-access festival archive of events (https://bit.ly/UroborosStream), a community mailing list and social media. This long-term community program is in its early stage and will be developed after securing necessary funding.
Key objectives for sustainability
The Uroboros project is inspired by emerging research showing that creative practice in art and design can help us achieve eco-social change but this potential is largely underutilized. Creative practice can foster change by bringing an experiential quality to sustainability projects and stimulating collective reflections and imaginaries of preferable futures. Such Imaginaries of future situations can help people grasp how various changes related to climate change processes may affect their own and collective lives. As curators, we believe that this process of stimulating co-creative transformative thinking and action is fundamental to the kind of cultural and sustainable shifts that are needed in the Green Deal. Our objective with Uroboros is to provide an inclusive space where diverse stakeholders can experiment with co-creative processes oriented at sustainability thinking and action.Informed by the EU Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and related research, we acknowledge that climate and ecological sustainability goals will only be attained by addressing both social and ecological sustainability issues. This interconnected approach to social and environmental sustainability is reflected in the broad scope of the Uroboros activities covering a wide range of topics, including more-than-human care & multi-species justice, synthetic media, gender & racial biases, algorithmic governance & civic activism, queering technology & social inequalities, circular economy & platform cooperativism, sustainable cities, and more. The variety and number of events, themes, artist contributions, and festival attendees show that our work in facilitating an inclusive and co-creative space for transformative thinking and action, has been successful.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The Uroboros is inspired by current research proposing that public engagement on sustainability can be explored through the lens of aesthetics – as a question of experience, affect, creativity and self-reflection. Uroboros events propose interactive activities that invite participants to actively engage with the addressed subject matter. Experiencing the Uroboros festival as a participant means actively co-creating and shaping the content proposed by the event organisers. In terms of digital and physical infrastructure, Uroboros events are carefully designed to support and sustain an audience of active co-creators, rather than passive spectators. The following events from the last Uroboros’21 festival exemplify the diverse and participatory nature essential to the festival experience: Anything-but-human – Mapping Islands, Drawing Care role-playing cartographic workshop organised by the all-women collective City as Spaceship invited participants to collectively reflect on multi-species entanglements and self-sufficiency in imagined sustainable ecosystems. The CreaTures Glossary: Building a Vocabulary for Change workshop by poet Amira Hanafi involved the audience in meaning-making games to co-define terms related to eco-social transformation. The OnlyBans playthrough by Lena Chen & Maggie Oates critically examined digital surveillance and the policing of marginalized bodies; and the Cicer cum Caule workshop enabled participants to learn about AI & embedded biases by making Polish dumplings. The 2021 festival’s visual identity aesthetically reflects the festival theme Designing in Troubling Times: it was produced with TroublingGAN, a generative AI model designed specially for the occasion and trained on examples of “troubling” images of our times. The TroublingGAN recognizes patterns in seemingly non-consistent dataset of photos and generates new images carrying the aesthetical essence of what we could interpret as “troubling times”.
Key objectives for inclusion
As curators, we commit to supporting a diverse and inclusive program – we pay careful attention to gender, cultural and disciplinary balance and we foster the inclusion of diverse expertise (contributors are both emerging and established authors selected through public open calls and direct curatorial invitations). All selected contributors are awarded an artist fee and receive support with technical production and public promotion and dissemination. We put emphasis on education and learning components of the program, and organise various collateral peer-learning and mentoring activities (details below).
The annual festival and its varied program is designed to accommodate diverse audiences, from youths to students to professionals, across diverse local and social contexts (the festival program with events running throughout a day is designed to suit all time zones). We provide an open-access, public festival archive online with recordings of all events. The Uroboros Bites series and the exhibition space in the DOX gallery provide a space for a year-long collaborations and showcase of creative works in both online and face-to-face format. To further enhance accessibility of Uroboros events, we provide the following:
– Free festival tickets upon request. To ensure wide accessibility, we waived the festival fees to everyone who was unable to pay and sent us an email request.
– Live-streaming the majority of the festival events for free, in a real time, via Youtube and Facebook
– Adding closed captions to all video content to enhance accessibility
– Special festival track in Slovak and Czech languages to support the engagement of the local art-design community that might have troubles understanding English content.
– A variety of festival formats (workshops, performances, LARPs, interactive talks, panels, exhibitions, playthroughs, etc.) to inspire participation of people with diverse skills and interests.
Results in relation to category
The Uroboros project leverages methods and approaches from the arts to foster a sustainable community building (Mobilisation of culture, arts and communities). The project focuses on nurturing long-term relational engagements and supports a diversity of inputs: starting from the annual festival, the Uroboros has sprouted into a globally distributed network of contributors with diverse social, geographical and professional backgrounds who share their knowledge from various areas of creative practice oriented at eco-social sustainability. By facilitating the festival and the community of practitioners around it, the project attempts to nurture people’s capacities to imagine and better understand current eco-social challenges, and address them in creative, collaborative ways. Uroboros aims to serve as an accessible space that is always open to proposals for new activities by any interested contributors. Our commitment to fostering community building and a shared sense of ownership of the project space is grounded in our belief that community connections and a relational sense of peer investment are necessary ingredients of any recipe for eco-social transformation. As described above, the Uroboros festival and collateral activities have been drawing a growing interest of creative practitioners, publics and other stakeholders. For the 2021 festival, we managed to secure partnerships with several projects and institutions working in the area of sustainability and creative practice; including the research project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures), the Slovak Design Center, the independent cultural space FUGA, the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), and the Arts Support Fund (FPU). This steadily growing interest suggests that the project has a considerable potential to support long-term community building and engender a meaningful contribution to sustainable social change.
How Citizens benefit
The Uroboros fosters the active, co-creative involvement of citizens in a variety of inclusive, participatory events. These include peer-learning as a key component: they avoid one-way knowledge transfer and instead encourage a mutualistic exchange. Citizens’ engagement extends from the role of passive spectators to active co-creators of sustainability imaginaries, activities and prototypes. Our aim is to provide participants with a sense of relational involvement and create a space where as many voices as possible can be heard. As curators, we believe in the importance of actively accumulating, nurturing, and responding to diverse situated knowledges as a crucial counter to the false ‘objectivity’ of sustainability projects imposing individualistic solutions based on top-down agendas. The international and interdisciplinary scope of the Uroboros festival provides fitting conditions for such exchange By nurturing collaborative engagements, we help build participants' capacities to better understand eco-social challenges and empower them to become active agents of positive change. This active public engagement contributes to an ongoing shaping of the Uroboros project, as it is evident from the progress of the festival program’s scope between 2020-21. The number of submissions to the festival open call doubled in 2021; several accepted projects came from public participants of the 2020 festival who were inspired by the festival's openness and felt encouraged to submit their own creative works. At both festivals, several events were organised by art/design students (university level), with whom we have established ongoing collaboration; providing long-term mentorship. The festival also includes a program section focused on young creative practitioners at elementary and high school level (age 13-18). Supporting young emerging artists and students is a key part of the project and its transformative goals.
Innovative character
The Uroboros project is innovative in several ways. First, Uroboros embraces a wide spectrum of creative practices, approaches, and initiatives in art and design covering a diverse scope of themes in eco-social transformation: from multi-species justice and more-than-human care to creative and critical use of artificial intelligence, to algorithmic governance and civic activism. The complex scope of themes and issues covered by the Uroboros project is unique. Second, Uroboros enables a widely accessible co-creative space for public engagements with sustainability issues. Events are freely accessible via live streaming, online public archive, website, social media and direct event participation. This accessibility is supported by the Uroboros team’s expertise in using diverse digital tools for online and hybrid co-creative events. This expertise has resulted from the urgent need to adjust the festival program to the unprecedented conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic in May 2020–the Uroboros festival was one of the first cultural events in 2020 that successfully adapted to the online format, maintaining the co-creative character of hands-on, face-to-face creative engagements. While the pandemic brought many challenges to the project and the organisation team’s personal lives, the ability to reach a more diverse, global pool of participants and the project’s internationalization through the hybrid/online format has been a positive aspect. Third, through its ongoing activities, the project has successfully sprouted into a long-term community of contributors committed to experimenting with diverse creative art/design methods for sustainable social change. Despite starting as a small, local peer-driven initiative, Uroboros managed to attract the interest of diverse partners in the field of creative sustainability and transformed into an international project with a global reach.
