Uroboros Festival

The Uroboros festival is an annual gathering of art-design-research practitioners experimenting with various creative means to help foster positive change in the troubled and fragile world.

Our collective inquiry and activities are inspired by the ambiguous symbol of Uroboros – a serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The Uroboros image 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.

The Uroboros project was initiated in late 2019 by a group of friends based in Prague [CZ] and officially released in May 2020 along 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.