With its 2022 theme Shedding the Skin, the festival sustains its ongoing interest in exploring creative pathways to societal transformation, shifting the focus to internal, personal and embodied dimensions of change. 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.
Shedding skin is a self-transformative process. It can be a discomforting, even painful and exhausting experience. Before shedding their skin, snakes cannot see very well and often find a safe place to hide and wait until the shedding process begins. The newly grown skin is fresh but tender and fragile, it needs to be cared for patiently to let it adapt to the local environment. Similar to this reptilian self-transformation, preparing for any profound change requires patience, resilience and attuning to our personal and local environments. The Uroboros festival aspires to be a safe space for long-term, collective experimentation with what eco-social (self-)transformation can mean in diversely situated contexts.
With these propositions, the 2022 festival aims to bring together a variety of creative and inspiring proposals for how we can co-exist on the more-than-human planet in mutually respectful, caring and hope-full ways. The main festival program happens in October 5th – 8th 2022 in Prague (CZ) and online.
The program sprouts from three distinct thematic sections – or Uroboros Loops – that take place ahead of the festival, in August – September 2022. The three Loops: The Feral Gift, the Algorithmic Resistance and the Sensing the Synthetic follow various engagement formats and approach the main festival theme Shedding the Skin from distinct perspectives. The Loops outcomes will be reflected in the main festival program and shared broadly, both with local and remote/online festival audiences.