Uroboros: Designing in Troubling Times (May 2020, Prague, Czech Republic)

Dates: 13-16 May 2020
Location: DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic
Website: Uroboros
Deadline for submissions: UPDATED 19 April 2020

The Uroboros festival critically reflects current global socio-ecological conditions and actively explores the viable role of design researchers and practitioners in supporting a positive change.

Festival Statement

Our current social ecosystem is spiraling in loops of dark and ominous events, making it challenging to remain optimistic. Climate emergency, global migration, resurgent nationalism, public health crises, deepening wealth disparities, white supremacy and patriarchy, university funding scandals and moral bankruptcies fueled by big tech – incessant bad news and predictions of looming catastrophic futures remind us of our collective failure as humankind. In these complex and complicated times, it is difficult to feel that we have any agency to nurture positive change and design anything good. Yet, we can’t afford to accept that ‘designing for better worlds’ is futile and impossible. Deeply aware of the privileges and biases hindering our perspectives of what such worlds could and should be, we are calling out the Uroboros: the ancient serpent eating its own tail that aptly captures our current global conditions as well as our attempts at finding productive responses. Rather than aiming to untangle the serpent and solve any of the problems it encircles, we wish to explore and challenge the social, political, technological, and epistemological circumstances scaffolding its pathways. Summoning the Uroboros collectively and carefully, we hope to better understand its dark loopings and engage in productive speculations on how things could actually – not just in principle – be different. The Uroboros design-art festival calls for works that engage critically, experimentally, and materially with our troubling global conditions to actuate a positive change.

Full statement: www.uroboros.design/festival-statement/

Open Call

We invite designers, artists, researchers, and practitioners of diverse backgrounds to submit their work reflecting the festival theme Designing in Troubling Times. We seek participatory works and proposals for collaborative doings open to interventions and renegotiations by other festival participants. The curatorial collective is enabled to accommodate a variety of formats; including workshops and walk-shops, performative enactments and interventions, experimental processes and interactive gestures, discussion circles and campfire debates, and other relevant formats that might not exist yet. It is vital for all accepted projects to enable active engagement of other festival participants and visitors; both lay and expert. Projects that support multi-species and more-than-human engagements are especially welcomed. Our aim with Uroboros is to create an open, experiential ecosystem for authors to cross-fertilize their work through a lively, rich exchange of thoughts and practices. We are committed and materially enabled to support a long-term duration of initiated collaborations and extend them beyond the temporality of the festival.

Key dates

Open call closes: March 31st, 2020
Decisions sent back to authors: April 14th, 2020
Uroboros festival: May 13.-16, 2020

Submission details: www.uroboros.design/open-call/


The Uroboros festival is curated by ALTTAB – a Czechoslovak collective of designers, artists, researchers, and practitioners gathered around a shared interest in ethical implications of emerging technologies.

More info at http://uroboros.design & hello@alttab.design & +420 776 740 672