Transdisciplinary festival for artistic practices and interventions in urban space
July 9–19, 2026
We are pleased to announce the third edition of Nine Elephants, a festival for artistic and transdisciplinary interventions in urban environments, taking place from July 9–19, 2026 in Sofia and its surroundings.
Titled Everything We Do, this year’s edition examines the relationship between the city and human action—from everyday routines and micro-practices to labour, learning, care, and collective responsibility. Between habit and transformation, economic production and invisible forms of maintenance, the festival explores the ecologies of interaction that shape urban life while opening possibilities for imagining different futures.
The festival presents more than twenty artistic projects developed in collaboration with three districts of Sofia, local communities, and cultural partners. Continuing its commitment to decentralization, Nine Elephants expands beyond the city centre, engaging peripheral territories, urban wilderness, and the social and ecological conditions emerging at the city’s edges. New commissions by Marie DuPasquier, Maria Makedonska & Nicola Zambelli, Viktoria Nikolova & Isul Kim, Gradoscope & Recipes for the Future, among others, explore neighbourhood memory, collective infrastructures, and situated forms of urban knowledge.
This edition further develops the festival’s international programme through a partnership with KADIST, a non-profit contemporary art organization, and its initiative Double Takes. On July 16 and 18, a film programme featuring works by Alice Bucknell, Giselle Beiguelman, Jeremy Deller, Olga Grotova, Christian Jankowski, Isadora Neves Marques, and Driant Zeneli will be accompanied by a discussion with AdHoc Atelier (Bucharest) on the transformation of urban space under post-socialist, neoliberal, and digital conditions.
For the second consecutive year, Nine Elephants hosts its peer-to-peer summer forum for exchange between artists, researchers, architects, urban practitioners, and cultural workers. This year, the forum takes place under the title Spontaneous Cities and is organized in collaboration with the Center for Social Vision. Running from July 15–19, it creates a platform for sharing practices, experiences, and methodologies across different urban contexts. The forum is complemented by a partnership with the Liszt Institute—Hungarian Cultural Center Sofia within the project Spontaneous Capitals, an exchange between Sofia and Budapest involving collectives such as Lea Novák & Szonja Urbán and the Girls Can Scan Collective, focusing on shared methodologies and situated practices in both cities.
The festival opens on July 9 with Echo Location, a solo exhibition by Vlatka Horvat at Swimming Pool. On July 10, Sofia Night Performance returns under the title Choreographies of Labour, bringing together performances, installations, role-playing games, and participatory formats that investigate labour as a social, economic, and cultural process. Featured artists include Kexin Hao, Lora Krasteva, Jana Romanova, and Silvia Cherneva, alongside other invited practitioners. A special project, POESIA NONSTOP, connects local shops and young poets through a distributed storytelling initiative across the city.
On July 18, Opera Ecologica unfolds at the Botanical Garden of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, bringing together workshops, interventions, sound works, and film screenings that draw attention to the labour of plants and more-than-human systems. The programme includes works by Valentina Sciarra & Alessia Simonetti, Mitko Mitkov & Mona Steinwidder (Museum of No Art), Deyana Stareva & Jaione Serrato, and Violeta Tsenova & Jemily Rime.
The festival concludes on July 19 in Fondovi Zhilishta, one of Sofia’s oldest workers’ neighbourhoods, where the New Choir (Vienna), together with Vasilena Gangovska and Pavel Naydenov, presents a site-specific performance engaging the memory, architecture, and urban history of the area.
On the occasion of the festival, Nine Elephants publishes Imagining Cities, a handbook on artistic practice in urban environments developed from the festival’s experiences and research over recent years. All events are free and open to the public.
Artistic Director: Viktoria Draganova.
Festival Team: Anna Ivanova, Rene Georgieva, Kristiana Barzinska, Crunchy Oyster, and Rosina Pencheva (Capturing Creativity).
Organized by Blue Cube Foundation with the financial support of the National Culture Fund, Sofia Municipality, the Ministry of Culture, the European Union, and Stroom Den Haag.
