UROBOROS 2024: NESTING ACROSS DIFFERENCE

Uroboros is an annual festival for artistic and 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.

The festival aims to serve as a common ground for collective experimentation rather than a showcase stage. Interested authors are invited to test new formats and methods, propose provocations, and bring forward ideas they might not have shared before. Instead of setting a fixed curatorial framing, the annual festival emerges from several streams of co-creative activities — or Uroboros Loops — organised with various contributors throughout the year.

The 2024 festival theme Nesting across Difference has emerged from a year-long program of co-creative events and encounters organised with various (more-than-)human partners across three countries (see Uroboros Loops 2024). 

The theme brings up difference as a key element in more-than-human worlds, 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?

The Nesting theme is reflected in the festival format. Distributed across three months in October-December 2024, the festival consists of several interconnected nests situated in various places in Prague and online. Each nest is built with the intention to explore more-than-human relationalities from a distinct perspective — including multispecies sensemaking, human-AI co-creation, and un/learning in climate dissonance — but leaves room for unexpected structures, formats, and connections to emerge.

Each nest is considered a shared space and a starting point for the co-creation of new ideas, sensory experiences, un/familiar situations, situated relations, and all kinds of fantastic creatures. We invite you to join this process of Nesting across Difference at any stage and navigate the path while following your intuitive sense of orientation. Bring your experiences and practices, twigs and leaves; share them with others, ‚see‘ what comes out, and carry it further – whether into another Uroboros nest or somewhere else.

An updated program of all Uroboros Nests is becoming available here as well as on our Instagram and Facebook.