Bulgaria | Imagining Cities 2025 call for artists

The Center for Social Vision is calling for emerging artists, curators, researchers, and cultural professionals to perform at Imagining Cities, an open and informal practice-sharing event, as part of the Nine Elephants Festival (10–20 July 2025) in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Over the past few years, the Center for Social Vision, and since last year the Nine Elephants Festival, both based in Sofia (Bulgaria), have been exploring the contradictions and complexities of urban life – its open structures, informal interactions, and non-discursive relations. Inspired by spontaneous street encounters, informal care networks, everyday activism, and unexpected urban affinities, they support transdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practices that imagine more desirable ways of co-living.

They are interested in situated artistic, cultural, and curatorial practices – including site-specific interventions, public art, social practice, sound, performance, cartography, cultural mediation, architecture, and speculative tools—that open up space for reflection, imagination, and action. They invite artist to share models, tools, and techniques, which they use to navigate the complex socio-political and cultural landscapes of today’s cities.

They welcome proposals for:

• Presentations
• Workshops
• Scores
• Walks
• Performative lectures

These can be realised either during the day or in the evening of the forum. They encourage a wide range of formats that foster interaction, engagement, and reflection on urban space.

Support

The programme can offer to up to five selected applicants based on criteria of strength and relevance a reimbursement up to 200 EUR. Please note that this fee is available only to those who do not receive other funding that covers part or all of their participation costs.

Imagining Cities 2025 application guidelines

Deadline: 12 June 2025