FESTIVAL: NINE ELEPHANTS VOL. 2 – FANTASTIC ROUTES
NINE ELEPHANTS & SWIMMING POOL art space have announced the second edition of Nine Elephants festival – a continuation of a fantastic conversation between residents and artists, poets and gardeners, experts and observers, which will take place over exactly ten days in July at various venues across the city – and for the first time in nearby villages!
In cities around the world – including Sofia – our daily itineraries pass through fractured geographies: between gated communities and informal zones, neglected communities and speculative landscapes, memory and forgetting, urgency and stasis. But in this fragmented environment, poetic, resistant, resisting paths – fantastic routes – also emerge.
Whether a festival, a chance encounter, a listening session or just a shadow under the tree, this year’s second edition under the theme “Fantastic Routes” will present over ten days a host of initiatives from the fields of art, performance, literature, cinema and more that navigate, think and invent urban space in an era of rapid and often contradictory change.
In this edition, not only the soils will speak, but you will have the opportunity to go on a tourist tour inside yourself, treat yourself to recipes for the future of students from the town, go to the cinema in the village of Dolna Dikanya and hear the poems of the inhabitants of Buhovo. For our part, we’ll ask if there was always hope in Hope, what happens to melancholy when old tram cars are renewed, and how happiness is measured in Student Town.
This year’s festival focuses on in-between moments and alternative trajectories. The artistic and transdisciplinary practices presented map new ways of coexisting, perceiving and narrating in the city – routes that may be unseen, impossible, imagined or as yet undiscovered.
More information coming soon!
NINE ELEPHANTS is a festival for art in urban environment. Our aim is to bring together artistic and interdisciplinary practices that map new ways of living, perceiving and narrating the city. The festival is an invitation to artists, writers, researchers, experts and residents to share the city in new and extraordinary ways.
The first edition of “Nine Elephants” took place from 11 to 21 July 2024 in different districts of Sofia. Within ten days we presented 19 artistic projects, including exhibitions and audio-visual walks, performance and momentary interventions in the city, theatre in the streets, literature between the blocks, as well as lectures and expert discussions related to the improvement of our environment. “Nine Elephants strives to develop cultural projects of high artistic value, while aiming to open new venues for art in the city. The name “Nine Elephants” is related to our desire to start the conversation about the issues that are important to us in a somewhat fantastical way, imagining art – like an elephant – making a surprise appearance on the streets of the neighborhood, in community centers, in offices, or even in the local gym.