Uroboros is an annual festival for artistic & design research inquiries into more-than-human ecologies and relations. Attending to ‘more-than-human’ as involving both multispecies nature and algorithmic agencies, Uroboros provides a co-creative space for practice-based investigations of contemporary social, technological, and environmental conditions.
Role:
Festival co-curation, organisation, and artistic research contributions.Year:
2020-ongoing2024 Nesting Across Difference
The 2024 Uroboros festival theme Nesting Across Difference brings up difference as a key element of more-than-human worlds, as places made up of many nests: temporary places of safety, comfort, and belonging.
Leaving one nest — whether a home, community, body, country, discipline, or creative practice — for another can be both painful and transformative, challenging and relieving. Sometimes, the movement between different nests becomes a nest in itself: a liminal place that escapes existing definitions and resists normative boundaries. For many, drifting in-between nests, re-rooting and shape-shifting without a clear point of arrival, is the only way forward, as there are no cozy nests on the horizon.
How do we arrive at destinations that don’t seem to exist (yet)? How do we know where and when to land, and whom to travel with? What do we keep in our carrier bags, and what gets tossed, lost, or forgotten? How do we make sense with the places and travellers we encounter on the way? Or – what does it take to nest across difference, in more-than-human worlds?
Leaving one nest — whether a home, community, body, country, discipline, or creative practice — for another can be both painful and transformative, challenging and relieving. Sometimes, the movement between different nests becomes a nest in itself: a liminal place that escapes existing definitions and resists normative boundaries. For many, drifting in-between nests, re-rooting and shape-shifting without a clear point of arrival, is the only way forward, as there are no cozy nests on the horizon.
How do we arrive at destinations that don’t seem to exist (yet)? How do we know where and when to land, and whom to travel with? What do we keep in our carrier bags, and what gets tossed, lost, or forgotten? How do we make sense with the places and travellers we encounter on the way? Or – what does it take to nest across difference, in more-than-human worlds?
Festival:
2024.uroboros.design
Uroboros Loops:
Feral Fields
Alter/Ecos
Creative AI Meetups
Prague, Helsinki, Oslo
2023 Feral Bodies, Synthetic Rituals
The 2023 festival invites creative experimentations with feral ways of relating to more-than-human ecologies. We explore ‘feral’ as a quality to appraise open-ended, situated, embodied, and unexpected encounters that unfold beyond the bounds of human control, in relation to other-than-human knowledge and experiences. By experimenting with feral ways in creative eco-social research, we hope to better understand the entanglements and tensions in more-than-human ecosystems, and question the power relations inherent in their formation.
Becoming familiar, growing new relations, and making sense with feral bodies – whether bodies of water, soil, microbes, trees, myths, dreams, codes, data, or algorithms in AI media synthesis – can nurture the shift from the anthropocentric making sense of to the relational making sense with the more-than-human worlds we inhabit. In times of climate collapse and multiple social crises, when the fracturedness of human-led strategies for planetary survival becomes intensely apparent, ferality may be seen as a timely and necessary intervention.
Becoming familiar, growing new relations, and making sense with feral bodies – whether bodies of water, soil, microbes, trees, myths, dreams, codes, data, or algorithms in AI media synthesis – can nurture the shift from the anthropocentric making sense of to the relational making sense with the more-than-human worlds we inhabit. In times of climate collapse and multiple social crises, when the fracturedness of human-led strategies for planetary survival becomes intensely apparent, ferality may be seen as a timely and necessary intervention.
Festival:
2023.uroboros.design
2023 festival live stream
Uroboros Loops:
Living with Feral Ecologies
Drift of Averselka
Creative AI Meetups
Prague, Helsinki, Oslo
2022 Shedding the Skin
With its 2022 theme Shedding the Skin, the Uroboros festival sustains its ongoing interest in exploring creative pathways to eco-social transformation in more-than-human worlds, shifting the focus to internal, personal and embodied dimensions of change.
The 2022 festival proposes for critical reflection that to help foster eco-social change, we must embody and become a change ourselves. It invites a co-creative turn inwards, opening a space for self-reflective, experimental work by human and non-human collaborators (animals, plants, microbes, technologies) exploring how we can live and thrive together in the times of climate change and social segregation.
How do inner transformations happening within our diverse private ecosystems – our bodies, hearts and minds – matter in the larger context of societal change? Can we, as socially and ecologically entangled individuals, appreciate and better understand our relational co-existence by turning inwards to our personal and, by definition more-than-human, interiors? How can this look and feel in the context of everyday living, working, playing, policy making?
The 2022 festival proposes for critical reflection that to help foster eco-social change, we must embody and become a change ourselves. It invites a co-creative turn inwards, opening a space for self-reflective, experimental work by human and non-human collaborators (animals, plants, microbes, technologies) exploring how we can live and thrive together in the times of climate change and social segregation.
How do inner transformations happening within our diverse private ecosystems – our bodies, hearts and minds – matter in the larger context of societal change? Can we, as socially and ecologically entangled individuals, appreciate and better understand our relational co-existence by turning inwards to our personal and, by definition more-than-human, interiors? How can this look and feel in the context of everyday living, working, playing, policy making?
Festival:
2022.uroboros.design
2022 festival live stream
Uroboros Loops:
Feral Gift
Sensing the Synthetic
Algorithmic Resistance
Prague
2021 Designing in Troubling times
The 2021 festival’s main theme Designing in Troubling Times is inspired by the ambiguous symbol of Uroboros – a serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The circular and cyclical Uroboros captures the ambiguity of present technologies and designs for the troubling and troubled times that we are living in. The serpent represents the mythological origins of all our technological promises about eternal returns and the search for utopia.
The 2021 festival critically explores how to approach the utopian promises and ideals of circular economy, platform cooperatives, participatory and inclusive DIY / DIWO, multi-species collectivism, more-than-human futures, and similar. How can we face our apocalyptic fears and prepare for a future radically different from life as we know it? What values are we keeping and circulating in our hopes for more sustainable and inclusive designs? Whom do we empower with every design solution; what do we avoid and expel?
The 2021 festival critically explores how to approach the utopian promises and ideals of circular economy, platform cooperatives, participatory and inclusive DIY / DIWO, multi-species collectivism, more-than-human futures, and similar. How can we face our apocalyptic fears and prepare for a future radically different from life as we know it? What values are we keeping and circulating in our hopes for more sustainable and inclusive designs? Whom do we empower with every design solution; what do we avoid and expel?
Festival:
2021.uroboros.design
2021 festival live stream
Online + Prague
2020 Designing in Troubling times
Planetary ecosystem is spiraling in loops of ominous events, making it challenging to remain optimistic: Covid-19 pandemic and public health crisis, climate emergency, global migration, resurgent nationalism, deepening wealth disparities, white supremacy and patriarchy, university funding scandals and moral bankruptcies fueled by big tech – incessant bad news and predictions of looming catastrophic futures remind us of our collective failure as humankind. In the times of looping crises, we can't fall into the trap of passive skepticism and lethargy. Being aware of the privileges and biases hindering our perspectives of what future worlds could and should be, we are calling out the Uroboros: the ancient serpent eating its own tail aptly captures our current global conditions as well as our attempts at finding productive responses. Rather than aiming to untangle the serpent and solve any of the problems it encircles, we wish to explore and challenge the social, political, technological, and epistemological circumstances scaffolding its pathways. Summoning the Uroboros collectively and carefully, we hope to better understand its loopings and engage in productive speculations on how things could actually, not just in principle, be different.
Festival:
2020.uroboros.design
2020 festival live stream
Online + Prague