Namibia fellowship

Together with the National Art Gallery of Namibia and Goethe Institut Namibia, Akademie Schloss Solitude has been organizing the Namibia fellowship since 2020 as part of the Namibia Initiative of the state of Baden-Württemberg. The fellowship welcomes artists from Namibia and artists from Germany working between the fields of visual arts (this also includes performance, sound, and mediation), literature/journalism (prose, poetry, digital journalism) and digital practice (digital art, gaming, hacking, computing). Artists from Namibia can apply for a four-month residency at the Akademie in Stuttgart, artists residing in Germany for a four-month residency in Namibia.

The aim of this bilateral fellowship is to establish a long-term artistic and cultural exchange between Namibia and Germany. It is part of the Namibia Initiative, in the framework of which the state of Baden-Württemberg is dealing with the processing of its colonial heritage and its consequences.

The program is thematically embedded in the project »Hidden Pasts – Shared Futures«, a two-part workshop series curated by Namibian artist and historian Memory Biwa, which initiates a collective approach to the history of colonial relations between Namibia and Germany and develops new artistic narratives on this topic. The entire project is also supported and accompanied by the Berlin-based Namibian artist Lahya Aukongo, whose focus is on the creation of power-critical and anti-discriminatory learning spaces.

The fellowship is intended to run until 2022 and is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg as part of the Namibia Initiative of the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Selection procedure

Artists working between the fields of visual arts (this includes performance, sound and mediation), literature/journalism (prose, poetry, digital journalism), and digital practice (digital art, gaming, hacking, computing) can apply for a four-month fellowship. The residency will include the opportunity to artistically explore the themes of restitution/reparation, cultures of memory, and digital colonialism.

For the residency in Namibia, we particularly welcome applications from Black people and/or people of African descent living in Germany.The application process is online. For this, a project outline needs to be submitted that artistically deals with the topics of restitution/reparation, cultures of memory or digital colonialism (maximum 1 A4 page) as well as a short curriculum vitae and a documentation of previous artistic work.

The jury is made up of two independent jurors.

Questions can be sent via email to Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff, s.thieroff@akademie-solitude.de