We’re delighted to announce the second edition of Nine Elephants and the 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 towns and 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 of the Fantastic Routes sub-theme will present a host of initiatives from the fields of art, performance, literature and film that navigate, think and invent urban space in a time of rapid and often contradictory change.
PROGRAM
In the second edition of Nine Elephants not only the soils will speak, but we will have the opportunity to go on a hiking tour inside ourselves, we will be treated to recipes for the future of schoolchildren on the route of tram line №10, we will go to the cinema in the village of Dolna Dikanya and listen to the poems of the inhabitants of Buhovo. For our part, we asked what happens to the melancholy when old tram cars are renewed and how happiness is measured in Student Town.
From 10 to 20 July, the festival will offer a programme of events from different fields of art, each of which will fit into the complex and contradictory landscape of the contemporary city. Even before the opening, we invite you to join Maria Minkova in weaving Druzhba by weave favorite stories and memories in the old flower gardens on the lake (July 5 and 6).
“Nine Elephants” will be officially opened on July 10 at the Swimming Pool with the exhibition Jump! Don’t Jump с works by Andrea Popyordanova, Krassimir Terziev, Mihail Novakov, Altzek Misheff, Nora Ampova, Savina Topurska, Sasho Violetov and Yana Loseva. With her, we will celebrate ten years of inspiration alongside the most fantastic empty pool in the world, which has long since – and especially on festival days – overflowed throughout the city. Together with the artist Zhana Ivanova, who is our special guest for the opening, we will play for the festival program.
On 11 July, immediately the day after the opening, Sofia Night Performance will take us through the streets of the neighborhood under Sofia Blvd. “Dondukov”. We invite you to a special Friday night where theatre, choreography, art and play intertwine in an exciting late night stroll. Then you’ll meet artists Ina Dobreva, Sofia Dimova, Silvia Cherneva and Karakashyan & Artists at four not-so-obvious locations, each of which will immerse you in the stories, movements and metamorphoses of the neighborhood.
In the following days, the festival unfolds alongside fantastic research by Iva Ivanova, Ashira Morris, Maria Makedonska and Nikola Zambelli, as well as in partnerships with Punta Gallery and Ina Valentinova, the Gradoscope Association, the “At the Cinema, in the Village” festival and more. The presented artistic and transdisciplinary practices map new ways of coexistence, perception and narration in the city – routes that may be invisible, impossible, imagined or as yet undiscovered.
Nine Elephants is going international for the first time this year, inviting you to a two-day Imagining Cities symposium with more than 20 participants (18/19 July), as well as a presentation of the interdisciplinary initiatives alongside the Urban Storytelling School research programme , organised by the Centre for Social Vision and C*Space Berlin.
