What is VISIT?

VISIT provides fellowships: VISIT is a fellowship programme run by the E.ON Stiftung. It provides young artists with the opportunity to create new work and pursue extraordinary projects.

The JUNGE AKADEMIE, VISIT, the artist-in-residence programme of the E.ON Stiftung and E-WERK Luckenwalde are cooperating to offer four fully funded fellowships once again in 2025 for international artists, to fund projects operating at the intersection of art, science and ecology, concerning the topic of the human-machine.

If you would like to learn more about E.ON before applying, take a look at the website.

What VISIT provides

The complex relationship between humanity and machines has been the subject of art and artistic practice since the beginning of the Industrial Age, echoing the beginning of the modern anthropocene, which takes on new meaning in the face of the climate catastrophe and the emergence and development of digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Fundamental and ingrained systemic, philosophical, economic, ecological and ethical concepts, as well as images of the world we live in, are being questioned. Following the Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, AI here is not considered as artificial or intelligent, yet „both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications.“ As Crawford also describes, it is one of the biggest myths in the field of AI, that intelligence exists independently of social, cultural, historical or political forces, whereas the concept of a superior intelligence has caused immense damage since centuries.

By discussing concepts, playing out scenarios and speculating on futures, the arts can generate a specific aesthetic knowledge in this area. Dystopian fictions around omniscient and sentient machines that turn against humans, develop desires and seek freedom in addition to fantasies of human immortality dominate the Western cultural imagination. 

The VISIT programme therefore funds international (emerging) artists, who work with, or address ideas surrounding digital technologies, the anthropocene, and/or Artificial Intelligence in the broadest sense. 

Practitioners are invited to apply ; who seek to question the political imaginary, challenge the Western story of ‘progress’ and problematic dualisms of “natural” and “artificial” and offer new ideas of patterns, narrations and approaches to a world with machines and who explore urgent aspects of today’s societies and the planet and transform their research into aesthetically compelling forms.  

Since 2022, the partnership between VISIT, JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste and E-WERK Luckenwalde specifically aims to deepen questions on sustainability in the field of digital technologies. How can we acknowledge or integrate our petro cultural histories into a landscaping of a renewable future? Where can humanity and machinery meet to ignite systemic change? How can we nurture more than human rights? 

Grant

Successful fellows will be endowed with EUR 20,000. This grant is intended to be put towards production costs of a new project, which may include research and development, travel and material costs.

Studio

Selected artists will have a studio space at E-WERK Luckenwalde or at Akademie der Künste, Berlin from April 1- June 30, 2025. During these three months, the fellows are expected to be living and working in the studios for at least 75% of the time.

Event Programme

Furthermore, joint events will be planned at the Akademie der Kunst and E-WERK, culminating in a joint exhibition at E-WERK Luckenwalde in Autumn 2025 for all fellows between 2023 and 2025.

Our jury

All applications will be reviewed by our independent and interdisciplinary jury. The jury currently consists of:

  • Anh-Linh Ngo, Architektur-Theoretiker und Kurator, Mitglied der Akademie der Künste, Berlin
  • Tiara Roxanne, Künstlerin und Forscherin
  • Anna Gritz, Direktorin, Haus am Waldsee
  • Sinthujan Varatarajah, Autor*in und Wissenchaftler*in

    Cooperation: Junge Akademie

    The JUNGE AKADEMIE supports international artists from all of the arts sections of the Akademie der Künste by providing residency and work fellowships as part of an interdisciplinary artist-in-residence programme. The three-month studio residencies offer fellows time, space and resources to focus on their art in a new environment. With this, the JUNGE AKADEMIE programme creates an open space for artistic research and the production of art and knowledge, which is actively shaped by each year's group of fellows together with mentors and members of the Akademie. It is an essential responsibility to maintain this free and protective space for artistic expression and exchange, experimentation and encounters across political and cultural borders. The JUNGE AKADEMIE has been dealing with questions about life and art with “intelligent” machines since 2019 with the Human Machine programme in cooperation with VISIT and E-WERK (since 2022). From 2022-2023, the JUNGE AKADEMIE organized the AI Anarchies programme on the topic of AI Ethics, which consisted of a fellowship programme with residencies at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin in 2022 and 2023, a transdisciplinary Autumn School, as well as the exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” at Akademie der Künste in 2023, which also presented all Human Machine fellows since 2019.

    New Partner in 2022: E-Werk

    E-WERK Luckenwalde is located in a former coal power station built in 1913, ceasing production in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall. Located 30 minutes south of Berlin, Brandeburg, E-WERK Luckenwalde is jointly directed by artist Pablo Wendel and curator Helen Turner. In 2017, the art collective Performance Electrics gGmbH led by Pablo Wendel acquired the former brown-coal power station with the vision to reanimate it as a sustainable Kunststrom (art power) Kraftwerk to feed power into the national grid by burning locally sources waste wood chips to make electricity, and function as a large scale contemporary art centre. As part of POWER NIGHT in 2019, Performance Electrics gGmbH formally switched the power in the former factory back on. Since 2019, E-WERK Luckenwalde has curated and commissioned an annual contemporary art programme exhibiting artists including Lindsay Seers, Keith Sargent, Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa, Peles Empire, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Cooking Sections, Karrabing Film Collective, Isabel Lewis & Sissel Tolaas, Tabita Rezaire and Himali Singh Soin, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, Lamin Fofana, Keiken, Henrike Naumann, Jenna Sutela, Lauryn Youden, L. Zylberberg, Peles Empire, Kira Freije, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Isabel Lewis, Paul Maheke, Harold Offeh, Bik Van der Pol, Nicolas Deshayes, Performance Electrics gGmbH, Lucy Joyce, umschichten, Nina Beier, Cecilia Bengolea with Craig Black Eagle, Performance Electrics, marikiscrycrycry in collaboration with Gareth Chambers, Charismatic Megafauna, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome with India Harvey and Josh Antonia Grigg, Rowdy SS and Nora Turato.

    E-WERK also supports artist residencies, collaborating internationally to deliver, as well as curating performances, music festivals and workshops. A CO2 neutral music festival curated by Khidja took place in 2022 featuring Suzanne Ciani, Svitlana Nianio x Sergii Khotiachuck & Roman Gens, Dopplereffekt, ladr ache, Wojciech Rusin x Jo Hellier, Lena Willikens x Marylou and Alicia Carrera. In 2021, E-WERK hosted and curated the German premiere and only CO2 neutral performances of Golden Lion awarded opera Sun & Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė.

    Kunststrom was founded in 2012 as a non-profit and CO2-negative energy provider. Renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and wood gas are used to generate energy through art, installations, sculptures, and performances throughout Germany. Currently, Kunststrom supplies cultural institutions, companies, and private households throughout Germany. As a non-profit, all income from energy sales go into the production of Kunststrom and the contemporary art programme at E-WERK Luckenwalde.

    Kunststrom is available through the energy cooperative Bürgerwerke. The switch is easy: go to https://www.kunststrom.com/switch.html to open our energy calculator and follow the instructions.