The Uroboros festival is an annual gathering of artists, designers and other curious creatures whose creative practice and research aim to foster eco-social flourishing. If this sounds like a rather broad area to you, you are not wrong: the call for positive societal and environmental change that we respond to at Uroboros involves addressing multiple interrelated planetary issues, ranging from rising temperatures and biodiversity loss to social insecurity and a weakening sense of privacy. While the first two festival years (2020 and 2021) approached these compound issues under a deliberately wide and open theme Troubling Times, the 2022 festival theme Shedding the Skin follows a slightly more narrow and down-to-earth perspective, pointing toward the internal, personal and embodied dimensions of eco-social change. The 2022 theme invites a co-creative turn inwards; opening a space for self-reflective, experimental and relational collaboration of diverse human and non-human contributors (animals, plants, microbes, technologies) exploring how we can live and thrive together in the times of climate change and social segregation.

Uroboros 2022 is a hybrid festival that takes place both in-person and online, in October 5th – 8th 2022. While in 2020-21, the festival activities had to happen mostly on-screen, this year we are finally able to organise a lively, in-person event in various locations in Prague. The three main festival venues are Kampus Hybernská (Campus Hybernská), Kasárna Karlín (Karlin Barracks) and DOX Center for Contemporary Art. While Uroboros 2022 is primarily a physical festival, we wish to keep the program accessible to our international community and many events will be available for active remote participation and/or streamed online. Check the festival program for more details.

While in-person events are now the norm again, the Covid-19 virus is still in the air and our goal is to make Uroboros as safe as possible for everyone attending. We are following the latest Covid-19 regulations and recommendations provided by the Czech Government. Besides these formal regulations, we would like to ask all Uroboros attendees to be considerate of everyone else’s needs at the festival: please be respectful and note that other people might have different preferences than you when it comes to the Covid-19 safety rituals. This includes e.g. social distancing: please assume that other attendees would appreciate you to keep a good distance and not have any direct contact (e.g., hand shaking, hugging, etc) unless you have checked with them first. If you have any symptoms that suggest that you might have Covid-19, please attend the festival remotely to avoid unnecessary risks. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to discuss anything further.

This year, the Uroboros festival features a four-day program with more than twenty events including workshops, panel discussions, lectures, theatre performances, performative walks, campfires, sharing circles and various co-creative experiments crawling across genres and formats. Check the festival program for more detailsssss! 

Yes! The festival is participatory and open to everyone. If you have no previous experience with eco-socially oriented art, design or other critical practice and are curious to learn more about it, you should definitely join us. The festival program features multiple types of events, ranging from more in-depth participatory workshops that require your active contribution, to panel discussions, lectures and theatre performances where you can be more of an observer and just listen in. The entry is free of charge for most events. Students are especially welcome to join. If you are still in doubt about whether to participate or not, feel free to drop us a line at festival@uroboros.design.

• As a festival visitor 

You can join us anytime between 5th-8th October 2022, either physically in Prague or online, for selected events. Most of the events are free-entry but you will still need to register (via Eventbrite), so we know how many visitors to expect. You don’t need to print any tickets, the registration confirmation will come to your email as a pdf, so you can show your ticket on your phone at the venue entrance. Two events require a small registration fee – this is because the artists need to cover their own expenses related to the event organisation and production (materials, equipment, etc). In the festival program, you can find details about tickets and viable modes of participation for each event. 

• As a festival artist

We have now closed the 2022 festival Open Calls but if you are interested in what is happening at Uroboros, please get in touch – we can think of various experimental ways of having you involved in the 2022 program and the 2023 festival is not that far ahead, after all. 

• As a festival volunteer

If you would like to join the festival team and help us with various production and curatorial tasks (both on the ground in Prague or online), let us know, please! We are a superbly small group of humans and can always use help. We can provide a certificate of art/design research internship or similar if it’s useful for your studies. Drop us an email at festival@uroboros.design.

The Uroboros project was initiated in late 2019 by a group of friends based in Prague, Czech Republic, and officially released in May 2020 with the inaugural Uroboros festival. The first festival edition was organised as a hybrid online/offline event and brought together over 600 designers, artists, researchers, and creative practitioners from around the world. Inspired by this interest, we decided to extend Uroboros from a one-off festival into a long-term project, re-imagining Uroboros as an annual festival series accompanied by various collateral events. The three humans notably responsible for all this snakey stuff are Markéta Dolejšová, Lenka Hámošová and Michal Kučerák.

The Uroboros serpent speaks many languages, we imagine… still, most of the 2022 festival events are held in English, some in Czech and Slovak (check the festival program for each event specifically). 

Uroboros – or Ouroboros as it is more common in English-speaking parts of the world –  is a mythical serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The ambiguous symbol of the Uroboros captures contemporary social, environmental and political frustration: it is a promise of new beginnings as well as endless returns, embodying a willingness to move forward but also the inability to break out of the old, extractivist practice of business as usual. We borrow the Uroboros symbol humbly and respectfully to help us guide our collective inquiry into the contemporary eco-social condition and our shared planetary futures.