Maxie Fischer is a photographer and researcher. Since the beginning of 2019 she has been working on her doctorate with the working title Michael Schmidt: Grey Aesthetics. Photographic practice and artistic discourse. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of a grey photography in contrast to color and black-and-white photography. She is interested in exhibitions and publications as a form of visualization and investigation of the understanding of artistic photography. In recent years she has been involved in many exhibition projects. Most recently, she worked as a senior consultant for documenta 14, where she was responsible for the German press in Athens and Kassel. Subsequently, as deputy head of the communications department, she conceived and set up digital communication for the Martin-Gropius-Bau. She has also contributed to exhibitions such as documenta 13, Bergen Assembly and the Berlin Documentary Forum and worked for institutions such as the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

In the framework of the fellowship she will work on a sub-project of her doctorate. The series Ein-heit occupies a key position in Michael Schmidt's oeuvre: in no other work has he so fundamentally questioned the function of photography as an image and the associated forms of historical construction.

Hagen Verleger is a Berlin-based independent graphic designer, artist, researcher, and editor. He completed his studies at the art academies in Kiel, Leipzig, and Maastricht. As a typographer and book designer, he mainly works for and with artists, cultural institutions, and publishing houses. Since 2010, his artistic work is centered around topics such as: the archive, authorship in design, fiction and reality, and institutional critique. His work has been shown in group exhibitions internationally. In 2017, he was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie / Margaret van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. In 2020, he was artist-in-residence at the Narva Art Residency, Estonia, as well as fellow at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

He is currently teaching at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Kiel) and working towards a PhD at the intersection of media studies, literary studies, and book sciences.

Picture: Hagen Verleger, "Margaret van Eyck", 2017; orange vinyl stickers on painted wall, ca. 80 cm × 550 cm

Dr. Alex Nowitz is a German composer and vocal performance artist as well as improviser, sound artist, electronic musician and artist-researcher. His compositional works encompass a good number of chamber music, vocal music, electroacoustic music, two orchestral miniatures, multidisciplinary concert performances, two full-length operas as well as music for dance and spoken theatre.

The range of his voice covers the countertenor, whistling, speaking and a variety of experimental voice types. He works with numerous musicians, singers and composers from a wide range of stylistic areas, more recently in September 2019 with the jazz pianist Michael Wollny at the Alte Oper Frankfurt. Expanding the field of vocal performance art, he applies custom, gesture-controlled live electronics, such as the ‘strophonion’ developed at STEIM in Amsterdam.

He has performed at internationally renowned festivals, e.g. in January 2019 at the opening festival 100 Years of Bauhaus at the Academy of Arts Berlin or, in November 2019, at the Audio Arts Festival in Krakow. In February 2019 he also successfully defended his doctoral thesis Monsters I Love: On multivocal arts at the Stockholm University of the Arts, in which he explored the possibilities of expanding the performance voice.

In the framework of his fellowship, Nowitz intends to compose a work entitled Chronotopes, a schizophony for five voices, eight instrumentalists and live electronics. The work aims to combine vocal performance art, instrumental music and choreography. Choreographic elements written into the score form an inherent part of the composition, in which the correlations between time-related (Greek: 'chronos') and spatial performances (Greek: 'topos') are investigated.

In our showcase
'Multivocal Voice and Sound Dance'. A conversation between Alex Nowitz and Matthias Osterwold (in German)
'über die kulturlose zeit'. An essay by Alex Nowitz (in German)
'Der Geist Von Gestern'. A composition by Alex Nowitz

Inci Güler works as a museum educator and is a founding member of the Dinner Club TDD (Tischlein deck dich), which was founded in 2007.

In the framework of the collaborative fellowship she will work—together with Gülsüm Güler and Lisa Schweizer—on the publication TDD—Tischlein Deck Dich.

In our showcase:
TDD Apropos Apéro Schloss Wiepersdorf. A video portrait

Phillip Zach was born in Cottbus. From 2007 to 2009 he studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, from 2009 to 2012 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. From 2014 to 2019 he lived in Los Angeles. Hunger for Sand is the working title of Phillip Zach's current project. In 2020, he will travel to various places where he will be documenting the mining of sand and other phenomena that occur in the course of globalization. His journey will take him to Brandenburg, India, China, Hawaii, and the Bay Area, where he will meet with people who all deal with these conflicts in their own ways.

During his fellowship he will edit the video material produced until then and expand the topic medially.

In our showcase
Formation Processes. On the work of Phillip Zach by Julia Mullié

Elvira Garifzyanova was born into a family of professional musicians. She studied piano and composition at the State Conservatory in Russia. Further studies in composition and electronic music in Germany and Switzerland followed. In 2012 she completed a one-year course in music informatics at the IRCAM Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris. She received various prizes and scholarships from international competitions and artist residencies and works with international musicians, ensembles, and orchestras. Her compositions have been performed at numerous international festivals for new music, including the Archipel Festival Geneva; Music Biennale Zagreb; Giga Hertz Award Festival ZKM Karlsruhe; 20th New Music Festival Sound Ways in Saint Petersburg; Russische Kulturtage in Freiburg 2017; EXPO Milano 2015; 40th International Music Festival in Munich; Antifonia Festival in Cluj-Napoca; next_generation 4.0 Festival ZKM Karlsruhe; Festival of Arts in Zurich; Mixtur Festival Barcelona; Inaudita Early Music Tuscan Festival, Pisa; CEME Festival Tel Avi; EviMus—4th Saarbrücken Days for Electroacoustic and Visual Music. Her pieces have also been performed at the following music centers and concert halls: Center for New Music San Francisco; IRCAM Paris;  Megaron—The Athens Concert Hall; Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich; Kultur-Casino Bern; Elastic Arts Chicago; Budapest Music Center; Arnold Schönberg Center Vienna; BKA-Theater Berlin; Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Saal Bâtiment des Forces Motrice, Geneva.

During her fellowship, Elvira Garifzyanova will work on new compositions. In her work she is interested in experimenting with acoustic, instrumental, and electronic sounds in order to discover their specific potential for further development. These sounds, which are related to playing techniques and spatial possibilities, will be analyzed and described in order to make them usable as a specific musical resource for new compositions.

Suki Kim's New York Times bestselling Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea Elite is a literary, investigative documentation of North Korea's most important recent history. Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism. Born and raised in South Korea, Kim has been traveling to North Korea since 2002. During a decade-long investigation, she has witnessed the celebrations of Kim Jong-Il's 60th birthday celebration and his death at the age of 69. In 2011, she spent six months undercover in Pyongyang to live with the future leaders of the country during the last year of Kim Jong-Il's reign. This gave her unprecedented insights into the psychology of its elite. Her first novel The Interpreter won a PEN Open Book Award and was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize. Her non-fiction appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Harper's, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, where she is a contributing editor. Her investigation of the sexual harassment at WNYC Radio for "The Cut," voted as ‘Best Investigative Reporting 2017’ by Longreads, led to the internal shakedown, from the dismissal of the longest-serving program hosts to the eventual exit of its president. Her essay on the fear for Lapham's Quarterly was published in The Best American Essays 2018. She was a Guggenheim fellow in fiction, a Fulbright fellow in nonfiction, an Open Society fellow at George Soros Foundation. Most recently, she was a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy, a Ferris professor at Princeton University and a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University.

In 2020 she will be completing the writing of her new book of narrative nonfiction, reflecting upon Germany and its past parallel to that of the divided Korea.

Tatiana Gerasimenok is a composer, researcher, and multi artist. She lives in Leipzig and Moscow. In her work she is interested in the combination of different art forms as a prototype of the coexistence of different senses of the human body. She was born in Belarus and graduated from the Mogilev Rimsky-Korsakov Music College as a musicologist. She studied composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 2019, she was selected as composer for the MATA Festival in New York, and she was granted residency fellowships at the art residencies Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Künstlerhaus Salzwedel, and the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Creation Residence in Spain. In 2018, she took part in the project No Medici at the International Darmstadt Summer Course. She won the ‘ad libitum’ composition competition (Baden-Württemberg) and ‘Temporality of the Impossible’ composition competition (Belgium/England). Her works were played on Radio Pulsar CISM in Montreal in 2018 and shown in the exhibition of graphic scores Sound Graphics in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. She has also been selected as a composer for the Académie Voix Nouvelles at Royaumont Abbey, the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, the EBMF International Summer Academy for Young Composers in New York and the Sixth International Young Composers Academy in Chaykovsky, Russia.

In the framework of her fellowship she will work on a piece for large ensemble where she seeks to combine the primeval with the latest times of mankind. Thus, wild and instinctive human behavior and archaic sounds will be combined with the latest technologies and modern human reality.

Lloyd Corporation is a collaborative project between artists Ali Eisa (b.1987, UK) and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b.1986, NOR). Working together since 2010 their practice utilizes sculpture, installation, performance and participation, often taking inspiration from informal and local economies.

Lloyd Corporation’s work takes shape through site-specific research and the collection of material culture, exploring the values, contradictions and material effects of capitalism on the urban landscape. Their practice also involves participatory works, exploring these issues and processes in dialogue with audiences and communities. These different making processes all aim towards a common ambition: rendering complex, abstract socio-economic issues—such as globalization and urban development—visible, located and connected to our everyday lives.

Selected exhibitions and projects include; Person to Person, Carlos/Ishikawa (2020); Local to Global, Carlos/Ishikawa (2018); For Some Future Time, South London Gallery (2018); Bankrupt. Bulk Buy. Liquidation. Repossession, Frieze Live, London (2017); Driftwood, or how we surfaced through currents, Fondazione Prada, Athens (2017); Developing Landscapes, Pump House Gallery (2016); Mirror City, Hayward Gallery (2014).

© Lloyd Corporation; Photo: Trisha Ward (2017)

Dr. Tanya Zaharchenko is a literary scholar, based most recently at the University of Oslo in Norway. Her research focuses on cultural memory and trauma, identity, nation(hood), borders and boundaries, and narratives of conflict. She was the 2015 Albert Einstein Fellow in Germany, and is the author of Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine (2016). Her work has appeared in international journals and edited volumes. She holds a PhD in Slavonic studies from the University of Cambridge (2014), a Master of Science from the University of Oxford (2007), and a BA from Bard College (2003).

Tanya is part of the project Art in a Conflicted World of the Cultural Foundation Schloss Wiepersdorf, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. During the time of her fellowship she will advance her research into Ukraine’s contemporary literary landscape, working within the triple contexts of trauma theory, memory studies, and literary analysis. Having introduced the category of ‘synchronous war novels’ in her recent article in Slavic Review (https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2019.95), she continues to examine cultural, intellectual, and literary responses to war in eastern Ukraine.

The artist, writer and activist Nikita Kadan, born in Kiev in 1982, studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev in the class for monumental painting until 2007.

Since 2004 he is a member of the artist group R.E.P. In 2011 Nikita Kadan was awarded the Pinchuk ArtCentre Prize and in 2014 the ‘Special Prize of the Jury of The Future Generation Art’. In 2014 he was part of the group exhibition The Ukrainians at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin, in 2015 he exhibited at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, among others.

The Ukrainian artist's artistic repertoire ranges from installation, graphic art, and painting to wall and poster design in public space. Just as diverse are his interdisciplinary collaborations with architects, human rights activists, and sociologists.

In his exhibition Projects of Ruins at the mumok museum in Vienna in 2019, he dealt with current socio-political developments in Ukraine and their foundations under Soviet communism.

Mirzali Akbarov, born in 1955 in the Ferghana region of Uzbekistan, studied at the State Pedagogical Foreign Language Institute in Tashkent, now the World Language University. He was initially a school teacher of English and later worked as a correspondent and department head for a newspaper. For another ten years, Mirzali Akbarov was head and chief translator of the German Service of Radio Tashkent International (RTI).

He now works as a freelance translator of German and German-language literature. In addition to short stories and narratives by Wolfgang Borchert, Friedrich Christian Delius, Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, he has translated Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Maximen und Reflexionen and Über Pädagogik by Immanuel Kant from German into Uzbek.

As a specialist in German Studies and freelance literary translator, he has spent several study visits in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He is a member of the International Hermann Hesse Society in Calw.

During his stay in Wiepersdorf he will continue with his translation of Goethe's epistolary novel Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde by Bettina von Arnim.

Nezaket Ekici, born 1970 in Kırşehir/Turkey, emigrated with her family to Germany at the age of three. 1994–2000, she completed an M.A. in Art Education at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. At the same time, she studied Art Education in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. 2000–2004 she completed her diploma and was a master-class student in performance with Prof. Dr. Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She has presented her works and 250 different performances in more than 60 countries on four continents, in over 170 cities, in various museums, galleries and at biennials. In 2013/2014, she was a fellow at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she was a fellow at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Prize, and in 2020, she was selected for the cultural exchange fellowship of the Berlin Senate to participate in the ISCP Residency Program in New York.

In her work, the artist focuses on themes such as identity, religion, art history and architecture. The ideas for her works originate from everyday life, the social and cultural atmosphere, and are presented as performances and installations. The artist uses her body as a narrative instrument. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.

During the 3-month fellowship in Wiepersdorf, the artist will realize the video performance Apeiron Forest—Apex (working title) in the park and the adjacent forest. This new work builds on her photographic work Apeiron Forest, which was created in 2007 in Schloss Wiepersdorf.

Sergey Khismatov was born in 1983 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and studied at the European University of St. Petersburg. 2010–2012 Khismatov attended composition seminars by Prof. Moritz Eggert in Munich. He participated in master classes in composition with Enno Poppe, Boris Filanovsky, Pascal Dusapin, Sandeep Bhagwati and Helmut Lachenmann.

As a composer, Khismatov is interested in the soundscape of our time, industrial soundscapes, spatial music, theater music, etc. Works like Cymbals Quartet, Microphones Quartet or Voice Quartet are inspired by an industrial environment and are staged as spatial music. In 2017 Khismatov realized his work A-Musik in the Bergbau-Technik-Park in Leipzig.

He received the Boston Metro Opera Advocacy Award 2014 for his chamber opera cycle to the left and he is the winner of the 2013 Hof Soundart-Composition Competition with the work Voice Quartet. His mini-opera after basho won first prize in the 2012 OSSIA competition in New York. He was also awarded a prize by the Ministry of Culture of St. Petersburg in 2012 and was a laureate of the Franz Josef Reinl Foundation.

In 2018 he received a fellowship from the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony for his project In Pursuit of Sound as well as a fellowship from the Foundation Künstlerdorf Schöppingen. In 2015 he received a fellowship for the European Dukley Art Residence in Budva; 2013–2014 he was an artist-in-residence at the International House of Artists Villa Concordia in Bamberg.

In the framework of the project Signals Sergey Khismatov will work on another composition for megaphone choir. The megaphone, as an amplifier of sound signals, unconsciously conveys the association of an industrial process in which communication takes place via radio or with the help of large horns or megaphones. Furthermore, the megaphone functions as a filter—the voice that sounds through the prism of the megaphone is given a metallic hue. During the performance of the composition, the singers of the megaphone choir and the audience move together through the park.

Natalia Pschenitschnikova, born in Moscow, is a singer, flutist, performer and composer. In addition to her soloist and chamber music activities, she works in various theater and dance projects. Her experimental work focuses on the correlation of sound and space, the ecology of sound and the energetic properties of sound and voice.

She dedicated recent performative and installative compositions to literary works of the Russian and early Soviet avant-garde (Velimir Chlebnjkov, Aleksej Gastev). Together with Martin Daske she forms the Duo Voicetronic, with Mikhail Mordvinov the Duo Pianovoice, and she leads the experimental voice group La Gol (Moscow). In her current project Brunnen der Erinnerung she confronts audio footage of others’ life memories with her own voice.

Natalia Pschenitschnikova is a graduate of the State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. As a soloist, she has interpreted numerous works written for her, including works by Bernhard Lang, Gia Kanchelli, Johannes Fritsch, Klaus Lang, Helmut Zapf, Sergei Nevsky, Helmut Oehring. She is a specialist for the vocal music of Giacinto Scelsi (cooperation with Michiko Hirayama). She has worked with conductors such as Theodor Kourentzis, Beat Furrer, Peter Rundel, Wladimir Jurowskij, Dennis Russell-Davies, Jürg Wyttenbach, Martiyn Brabbins and participated in numerous international festivals (Venice Biennale, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wien Modern, Berliner Festwochen, Märzmusik and others). She was co-founder of the Moscow festival for new music 'Alternativa'.

During her stay in Wiepersdorf she will work on her new piece Requiem for a Flower, a performance with objects for solo voice and live electronics.

Julia Carolin Kothe (b. 1991 in Gießen, Germany) makes and conflates sculptural installation, sound, moving image, performance and text. Her practice evolves across various mediums, materials and formats by exploring (im)possibilities of communication between objects and bodies including spectators, performers and herself. She probes and constructs the roles and relationships they play in different spaces and scenarios. She is less interested in a finished work than in how these objects and subjects interact / interplay within different (exhibition) formats and in the physical traces that processes and actions leave behind. By using non-linear narratives she reflects on haptic encounters composed with her hands, memories, dialogues, references and suggestions. In 2019, she graduated from The Glasgow School of Art (UK) with a Master’s degree focused on sculpture and she holds a Master’s degree from Kunsthochschule Mainz (D).

In collaboration with creative practitioners, she has worked across different platforms such as zines, performance / art festivals and exhibitions. She co-founded the artist-led space ruelle (https://ruelle-raum.de), and in 2019 released chains—the first edition of a zine series at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, in collaboration with artist Julia Gerke. Past exhibitions include mañana bold (Offenbach, Germany), ATLETIKA Gallery (Vilnius, Lithuania), Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany), Kunsthalle Mainz (Mainz, Germany), POKY—Institute of Contemporary Arts (Mainz, Germany), Kulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim (Rüsselsheim, Germany). In 2020, she published a radio show at Palanga Street Radio (Vilnius, Lithuania) and a text for Der TYP (Offenbach, Germany).

Julia Carolin Kothe lives and works in Glasgow (Scotland).

Regina Scheer, born in Berlin, studied Theater and Cultural Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. From 1972–1976 she was cultural editor at the newspaper FORUM and has been working since as a freelance author, editor, historian, and journalist. Between 1966 and 1990 she published poetry and literary works in anthologies and magazines, she wrote song lyrics and journalistic articles on various topics. Between 1987 and 1989 she conducted and recorded life-history interviews with former prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and has since then worked on numerous films and exhibitions on this topic. After 2000 she devoted herself to biographical work with migrants in Berlin-Wedding. Regina Scheer is a member of the VS (writers' association of ver.di) and a PEN member.

Among her numerous book publications since 1992 are:

Im Schatten der Sterne. Eine jüdische Widerstandsgruppe, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2004
Wir sind die Liebermanns. Geschichte einer Familie, Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2006
Kurt Tucholsky, Hentrich & Hentrich, Teetz 2008
Max Liebermann erzählt aus seinem Leben, Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2010
Machandel, novel, Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich 2014
Gott wohnt im Wedding, novel, Penguin Verlag, Munich 2019

During her stay in Wiepersdorf, Regina Scheer will work on her novel Bittere Brunnen, a literary approach to the life of Hertha Walcher, née Gordon, wife of the communist trade unionist and politician Jacob Walcher and secretary to Clara Zetkin in the 1920s.

Hakan Ulus (*1991 in Buxtehude) is a German composer. He studied composition with Tristan Murail, Adriana Hölszky, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and Ernst Helmuth Flammer at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and the HMT Leipzig. He also received inspiration in master classes with Pierluigi Billone, Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin and Steven Kazuo Takasugi. He was a fellow of the Harvard Composition Institute Residency 2014, DRC Singapore 2015 and ManiFeste Academy 2017.

Performances of his works in Germany, Austria, France, Sweden, Turkey, USA, Australia, Singapore and Great Britain by Klangforum Wien, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Recherche, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, AuditivVokal Dresden, Norbotten NEO, Ensemble mise-en, IEMA-Ensemble, Ensemble Aventure and Hezarfen Ensemble, among others.

Various fellowships, e.g. Berlin Scholarship of the Akademie der Künste Berlin 2017/18, Artist in Residence at Thomas Bernhard Haus Ottnang 2019, Kunststiftung NRW 2017, Jonathan Harvey Scholarship 2017-20, IEMA 2015/16; prizes, e.g. impuls Composition Prize 2017, AuditivVokal Composition Prize 2018 and commissions, e.g. Klangforum Wien Australia National Academy for Music.

He teaches at the University of Huddersfield, where he is currently completing his PhD in composition (Supervisors: Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim). Since January 2020 he has also been teaching analysis and aesthetics of contemporary art music at the Gustav Mahler Private University of Klagenfurt. His works are published by Edition Gravis.

During his three-month stay in Wiepersdorf, Hakan Ulus will compose a new piece for two bass clarinets, two saxophones and percussion. Clarinet and saxophone are, along with the piano, among the 'main instruments' in his music: "I am particularly interested in emphasizing the vocal, 'recitative' character of the instruments. The entire vocal apparatus should be compositionally illuminated and deconstructed. What new musical material can be generated when inhalation and exhalation are brought into direct contact with the instrument—for example, inhalation sounds combined with tight vibrato and flutter tongue? The interest in this approach comes primarily from the musical fascination with Koranic recitation and its fine nuances. The Koran recitation has been an important source of inspiration for my music for several years now".

Naomi Liesenfeld lives and works in Bonn. From 2010 to 2018 she studied conceptual painting and sculpture in Saarbrücken and Zurich.  In 2018 she became a master student with Katharina Hinsberg. She received a fellowship of the Cusanuswerk and a studio scholarship of the Bonner Kunstverein in 2018.

Naomi Liesenfeld deals with color and its unfolding in space and time. In her artistic practice she creates abstract and minimalist works on canvas, wall, and paper as well as objects that attempt to stretch the boundaries of the perceptible. Liesenfeld's interest is equally focused on color production and the properties of image carrier materials. Her work thus aims at an interaction of these two worlds. She often collects and produces pigments from natural color substances, which are then ground and dried to produce her color palette. Plants and fruits are turned into color-bearing objects, cornflowers and poppies are processed into pigment powder, string beans grow in gallery rooms where their harvest is used as a coloring agent for wall paintings and drawings. These non-preserved, changeable colors have a life of their own and play with the viewing and perception habits of the viewer as they are constantly changing.

Nero Campanella was born in Saarbrücken in 1977 and grew up in Saarland. He completed his studies of literature and musicology in Cologne with a master's degree. After publishing numerous literary and non-fiction texts (columns in the Berliner Zeitung, a travel guide, poetry in Frank Zumbach's Balladenbuch, Der Exot, and others), he has been working since 2016 on the multi-volume cycle of novels Fuga Mundi, which centers on the autofictional character Nero Campanella. Based on a series of novels and paratexts of different genres, the disappearance of the Western world is narrated. During his stay at Schloss Wiepersdorf, Nero Campanella will continue working on the first part of the series, Saturnische Nacht.

Susanne Gabler lives and works as a visual artist in Wismar. After completing her studies in Applied Arts, she freelanced in the fields of fine arts, graphics and interior design. Since 2019, Gabler has been the managing director of Galerie Hinter dem Rathaus in Wismar, together with two other female artists.

In 2018, she received a state scholarship and lived and worked as an artist-in-residence in Iceland.

She develops and produces diverse art projects, art events and exhibitions for art institutions. She works in different collaborations, explores science communication, and her own artistic work focuses on objects, spatial installations, participatory art interventions and photography.

Injustices become recurrent content of her artistic work. In the process of creation she develops translations of initially abstract feelings. The primarily aesthetic objects allow easy approach, but in close observation, they are recognizable as drama. The artworks deliberately cause secondary feelings, through which the viewers experience the immediacy of her art. Her works reflect our conflict between consumption and preservation—between the structures of our habits and the resulting responsibility. The cycles of life that have existed since time immemorial are the basic principle of sustainability. Despite this knowledge, Gabler wonders why we ignore the consequences of action and abuse our limited lebensraum instead of correcting our actions. Gabler's art places the recipients in this confrontation. She observes the reflections that follow and fathoms our social entanglements in structures and desires.

In Wiepersdorf, Gabler wants to deal with the artifacts of neoliberalism: Does "good" come from "goods"? Or, vice versa, shouldn't "goods" be the derivative of "good"? What is the good? What are our highest goods? Who can't see, hear, or taste the loud and clearly worldly threats? Where is our goodness among all our goods? Neoliberalism works only finitely and only those at its top can profit. I look for the "good" in the goods and ask: Which goods actually deserve the predicate good?

www.susannegabler.de
Instagram: @susagabler

Maximilian Otto was a student at the Sächsisches Landesgymnasium für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden in the major subjects piano and double bass and in the minor subjects composition and conducting. Since October 2018, he studies orchestral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden with Prof. Ekkehard Klemm. He is a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation) since 2019.

He has received numerous composition prizes, including the Bialas Prize of the GEMA Foundation and ten national prizes at the national competition “Jugend Komponiert”. He also conducted many of his world premieres and regularly conducts orchestras such as the Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen, the Sinfonietta Dresden, the Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie Chemnitz and his own orchestra “Junge Sinfonie Dresden”. In 2019, he performed his piano concerto as a soloist six times with the Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen. In the same year, his orchestration of Contrapunctus I from J. S. Bach's The Art of Fugue was performed with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. The same arrangement would have been heard in 2020 in the 9th symphony concert of the Staatskapelle Dresden—the performance was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Wiepersdorf, Maximilian Otto would like to reflect intensively on his authenticity as a conductor and honesty in making music—completely free of any apparent constraints or expectations that one believes one must fulfill. In addition, he would like to use the time to plan his next orchestral work and expand his conducting repertoire through study.

Iryna Herasimovich was born in Minsk in 1978. A literary translator and essayist, she has translated authors such as Lukas Bärfuss, Franz Hohler, Dea Loher, Nora Gomringer, Jonas Lüscher and Ilma Rakusa into Belarusian. She works as a dramaturge and curator in the field of visual arts and is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry.

When Belarus was still a blank spot on the map, there was already an idiosyncratic, heterogeneous cultural scene that created spaces in which ideas of a life that was not controlled took shape. Under the unfavorable conditions of the rigid system, fixated on the Soviet past, a parallel society was able to develop, in niches, invisible to many. The repressions that have swept the country and traumatized society since the crushing of the white-red-white protests have also dissolved these niches. Iryna Herasimovich offers insights into this scene. Many things are now breaking open: repressed conflicts, illusions, hopes and disappointments. "Who is standing at which point? What was before that? What comes after?"

Tomomi Adachi is a performer/composer, sound poet, instrument builder and visual artist. Known for his versatile style, he has performed his own voice and electronics pieces, sound poetry, improvised music and contemporary music, also presented site-specific compositions, compositions for classical ensembles, theatre pieces, choir pieces for untrained musicians and sculptural poetry pieces in all over the world including Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Tate Modern, Maerzmusik, Centre Pompidou, ZKM, Palais de Tokyo and Akademie der Kuenste Berlin. He has interpreted historical experimental music works by Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff and notably “Europera 5” and “Variation VII” by John Cage as Japan premieres. He has been working with a wide range of materials; self-made physical interfaces and instruments, artificial intelligence, brainwave, artificial satellite, twitter texts, fracture and even paranormal phenomenas. As the only Japanese performer of sound poetry, he performed Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate" as a Japan premiere in 1996. CDs include the solo album from Tzadik, Fontec, Omegapoint and naya records. He stayed in New York from 2009 to 2010 as a grantee of Asian Cultural Council. He was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD for 2012. He received the Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica 2019.

Thomas de Padova was born in 1965 to German-Italian parents in Neuwied am Rhein. His studies of physics and astronomy in Bonn and Bologna opened up to him a variety of perspectives from which researchers view the world. He has made it his mission to bring these perspectives closer to a reading public, first as an editor at the "Tagesspiegel" and since 2005 as a freelance author and publicist.

In books such as "Alles wird Zahl," "Leibniz, Newton und die Erfindung der Zeit" and "Das Weltgeheimnis," he questions how knowledge and skills that pass from one country to another can, under the respective local conditions, be transformed into something unprecedented, be it an astronomical telescope, the balance wheel of a pocket watch or a symbol such as "=" for an arithmetic operation, in short: how the new comes into the world. With "Nonna," a book about his southern Italian grandmother, the story of a summer that unites all other summers, he has expanded his narrative repertoire.

In Wiepersdorf, he wants to build on this development and transport himself back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His particular focus will be on the gradual discovery of a deep time that goes back tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years and into which man entered late.

Sarah Duffy’s practice is interdisciplinary: spanning performance, sound, video and installation, with a focus on uncovering hidden narratives and making visible intangible elements of our world. This interest has led to an on-going investigation into the human voice and its immaterial properties. Duffy often attempts to embody her research; for example, in response to an extensive period of study into the spiritualist history of ventriloquism performed by female mystics, she spent 7 months training to become a ventriloquist, eventually staging unique site-specific performances in locations, such as a former interrogation chamber and a tunnel under The River Thames. Sarah Duffy (b.1986) lives and works in the UK. Duffy graduated in 2013 with an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London; after which she became the inaugural recipient of The Acme Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award. Projects and exhibitions include Solo Performance Om3am x Sarah Duffy hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jos Bitelli and Felix Melia; Enjoy The Silence at The Camden Arts Centre, London; The Frequency of Magic at out_sight Gallery, Seoul; A Far Away Rendez-vouz at SixtyEight Art Institute Copenhagen; The Ol’ Switcheroo at Jupiter Woods, London and Nothing is – everything just has been or will be at Gallery dam dam, Berlin. Selected residencies include: seMA Nanji at The Seoul Museum of Art and a Triangle Network Fellowship at Lugar a Dudas in Cali, Colombia. In 2020 Duffy joined the 5-year Acme Fire Station live/work programme in London, and in 2021 she was in residence with Artlink at Fort Dunree in County Donegal, Ireland.

Petra Heymach was born in Biedenkopf/Hesse in 1951. After studying special needs education and psychology, she worked as a teacher with a special focus on language at a school in Berlin/Kreuzberg. Her interest in Bettina von Arnim and her family began at the age of 18. Initially, she approached the subject with staged readings such as Goethes leidige Bremse, Szenen einer Ehe (Literaturhaus Berlin) and various lectures such as Bettina, eine Revolutionärin? From 1989 onwards, she devoted herself specifically to family research and conducted research in the archives of the (former) GDR. In 1992, she mounted her first exhibition, Vom Familiensitz zum DDR-Künstlerheim Bettina von Arnim at Schloss Homburg (North Rhine-Westphalia). In 2000, intensive research began on the painter Achim von Arnim-Bärwalde for a conference at Schloss Wiepersdorf in 2001 with the contribution Ein Cravaller mit großen Feusten. This was followed by training as an exhibition curator at the UdK in 2014 and various further training courses on the subject in 2016. From May to July 2015, she curated the second exhibition at Schloss Wiepersdorf on the life and work of the painter Bettina Encke von Arnim with the accompanying book Die Malerei ist mein ganzes Glück.

Charlotte Misselwitz works in Berlin as a journalist and media researcher. Her essays and features in print and radio deal with questions and stories between Germany, Israel and Eastern Europe. She was born in East Berlin and lived for a longer time in Russia and Israel. In Wiepersdorf she will work journalistically as well as academically on 'Anti-Semitism in the GDR versus the attachment of Jews to the state'. Using the grandchildren of the scientist Albert Wollenberger as an example, the left-wing heritage of the Jews in the GDR will be examined as a "blessing and a curse". In this way, Charlotte Misselwitz continues a recent German-German academic and media debate that she initiated together with historians such as Sonia Combe and Wolfgang Herzberg. At issue are prevailing representations of the GDR as 'anti-Semitic,' for example, which are sometimes contrasted with far more progressive conditions in the GDR. Her dissertation, "Stereotypisierungen des Muslimischen in deutschen und israelischen Medien. Narrative Rückspiegelungen durch Medienkunstprojekte" (Stereotyping the Muslim in German and Israeli Media. Narrative Reflections through Media Art Projects) at the Universities of Essen-Duisburg and Tel Aviv will soon be published by De Gruyter.

David Polzin was born in Hennigsdorf in Brandenburg and grew up in neighboring Velten. During his six-year studies, he studied art for one year in Israel at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. At the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (KHB) he completed a diploma with Prof. Eran Schaerf (2008) and a master student degree (2009).

After graduation, he had his first solo exhibition in Berlin (Galerie Anselm Dreher) and his first international solo exhibition in Brussels (Galerie Waldburger Wouters) in 2010.

Since then, he has exhibited internationally, including Japan, Russia, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and the USA. Since his first institutional solo exhibition at the MMK in Frankfurt a.M. (2013), the focus of his work has been on the German-German unification of the GDR and the FRG and the Wende era. In his works he creates design hybrids, with a focus on seating furniture and utility graphics, consisting of East and West German elements.

Antje Vowinckel is a composer, music performer and radio playwright. She studied literature, along with music and sociology in Bielefeld and completed her studies with a doctorate on "Collagen im Hörspiel" (Collages in Radio Drama).

She then completed a traineeship at SWR in Baden-Baden, where she worked for three years as an assistant director, author and dramaturg. After moving to Berlin in 2000, she went on to direct radio plays and sound compositions for numerous ARD stations; later, she also produced for concert promoters, exhibitions, festivals and CD labels. In recent years she has also realized various installations and performances in public spaces, video compositions, stage performances and a sound aquarium. Her radio play Call me yesterday has been broadcast and presented in 17 countries. In her work, Antje Vowinckel repeatedly addresses the relationship between music and language, for example in compositions with dialect melodies or in her method of Automatic Speaking. She uses everyday objects, instruments electronic sounds and her own voice in her compositions and performances. In addition, she occasionally works as an essayist, lecturer, curator and juror. She has received numerous prizes and grants for her work, including the Karl-Sczuka-Förderpreis and recognitions at Prix Ars Electronica and Prix Phonurgia Nova. In 2021 she was nominated for the German Music Authors’ Award and for the World Music Days in Shanghai.

Andrea Hensgen grew up in a very small village on the French/Luxembourg border. This childhood among woods and meadows, barns and stables, cranky farmers and quirky neighbors is still the treasure from which her joy in storytelling draws. In order to put into practice the decision she made at an early age to become a writer, she completed a degree in literary studies in Saarbrücken. In the process, she discovered the great works of European literature.

Her engagement with the intellectual traditions of Europe has shaped her work to this day, ever since her first books, novels for young people. Philosophical questions are at the center of all her work. Her gaze is directed above all to those designs of successful life that European culture has produced. In the meantime, she has published novels, short stories and also a novella in the field of fiction. At the same time, her oeuvre includes children's books, picture books with and without words, and non-fiction books on early education and gardening topics.

Her work has received many awards and grants in various European countries.

Today, Andrea Hensgen lives in the middle of Sachsenhausen, a district of Frankfurt, just as lively and full of whimsical contemporaries as her village was back then.

Said Azh, born on 3/6/1999 in Stuttgart, is a German/Persian composer who, due to his back-ground, seeks to explore the dialogue between Persian and Western/German ideals in music. He won the Jeunesses Musicales national competition "Jugend Komponiert" four times in a row, with previous prize-winning pieces "Aban", "Ghazal", "Liminal Spaces" and this year's prize-winning piece "Pasyryk-Fragmente" for flute and ensemble.

Other projects include pieces for the Carl Bechstein Foundation in cooperation with "NEUES ZEUG", several orchestral pieces within the framework of the Stuttgart Music School dealing with Turkish Baglama music, and cycles for voice solo and choir, such as "Kare hame rast" for voice and vibraphone, or "Weltliche Gesänge", performed within the framework of the State University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart.

Besides composition, Said Azh is the choir director of LU im Takt and is currently studying music and English in Stuttgart for a teaching degree.

Monika Hau was born in Saarbrücken in 1956. She received her artistic education from 2001 to 2006 with Professor Bodo Baumgarten, HBKsaar, until 2011 her focus was on painting. Since 2012 she has been working with the line, the line in space and net structures. This turning point opens up new themes, which are arrested both in the here and now, as well as in society.

Different life stories become the input of graphic representation and thus become perceptible in a new way. She questions our perceptions by making visible people, paths, distances, the worthless and the invisible.

In her new project Monika Hau deals with things. In our fast-moving times, many things go unnoticed. Things that do not represent a momentary value are hidden from our perception. The worthless lies as waste in public spaces, yet it refers to something. Found objects that lie unnoticed in different countries in the urban space, or in the rural space, are transformed.

During her stay in Schloss Wiepersdorf, Monika Hau wants to continue the project she has started.

Zmicier Vishniou, born in 1973, is a writer, poet, performance artist, literary critic and program director of the literary magazine Teksty and co-founder of the artists' movement Bum Bam Lit. Since 2007, he has run the independent Minsk publishing house Halijafy together with Michas Bashura. Martina Jakobson's German translation of the novel "Das Brennesselhaus" (luxbooks) was published in 2014. A residency at Berlin's Künstlerhaus Tacheles inspired him to write this debut. In 2018, his novel "If you look closely, Mars is blue" was published, which is still waiting to be translated into German. In 2006, he was a guest author at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.

Lukas Ratius was born in Saarbrücken in 1989. Between 2011 and 2017 he studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar and holds a diploma in communication design. For his final project "Taranto: Raffo, Cozze e Scontri", he spent six weeks in 2016 documenting the everyday life of a group of soccer fans in Taranto, southern Italy.

Since 2017, he has been working as a freelance photographer on his own projects and photo books or for different clients. His photos have been published in various magazines and newspapers, such as the 11 Freunde magazine, the ZEITmagazin or the Süddeutsche Zeitung (selection). In 2021, Verlag Kettler published the photo book "Der Apparat", in which the small-scale aspects of adminstrative and political networks in the federal state of Saarland are illuminated photographically. Between 2020 and 2021, the documentary "18+ Deutschland – was junge Menschen bewegt" was produced for ARD in collaboration with filmmaker Philipp Majer and in co-production with SR, MDR and rbb. In 2022, Ratius had his first institutional solo exhibition under the title "Der Apparat und andere Geschichten” at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken.

In his free works during long-term documentary observations Lukas Ratius is primarily concerned with the visualization of social mechanisms, networks and structures.

Sophia Ato is a multimedia artist and architect. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and studied painting and architecture at the Shevchenko Art School. In 2019 she graduated with a master's degree in architecture from Kyiv National University (KNUBA).

As part of her studies at the InLab studio, she created a parametric project-research on the transformation of space.

She worked on the creation of the project of the UnitCity innovation center and other multifunctional complexes.

She is currently an artist for the MetaHistory, which aims to capture the country's events in digital history and help raise funds to rebuild the affected cities.

During residency in Wiepersdorf, Sophia Ato would like to create a project based on the study of the cultural and worldview diversity of the regions of Ukraine and their self-identification.

Wiebke Elzel studied artistic photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (HGB), diploma 2006 with Prof. Timm Rautert, master student from 2007–2009 with Prof. Peter Piller, also at the HGB Leipzig. From 2012–2018 she taught artistic photography at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM).

She has received numerous grants and awards for her artistic work. Her works are represented in various collections, e.g. the Photographic Collection of the Museum Folkwang, Essen or the collection of the Kulturstiftung Sachsen. Her works were recently on view at the Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, or the Ludwig Museum Koblenz, among others.

Wiebke Elzel's artistic work is characterized by narrative elements. She works mainly with the media of photography and text, which she interweaves into associative narrative forms. Using individual phenomena, historical puzzles or events, she deals with contemporary issues.

In addition to the exhibition space, the book format is an important presentation medium.

Since 2007 Wiebke Elzel lives as a freelance artist in Berlin.

Hunjoo Jung is a German based South Korean composer of acoustic, electronic and electroacoustic concert music as well as intermedia installation art. In recent years, besides focusing on acoustic music, Jung has also been exploring multi-complex structural ways in which interactive visual, live video and video mapping, lighting & laser, sensor, actions and/or sculptural forms of objects can be used in a wide range of combination with acoustic, electroacoustic and electronic music in spatialization.

His most recent works will be/have been commissioned/performed by ensembles such as Distractfold [UK], Curious chamber players [Sweden], Talea [USA], KNM Berlin, Recherche [Germany], Mimitabu [Sweden], Interstring Project [Germany], Surplus [Germany], S201 [Germany], Multilaterale [France], Soloists such as Taylor J. Borden from Mivos Quartet [USA], Niklas Seidl from Ensemble Mosaic [Germany] and Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn [USA] among others.

His music will be/has been premiered in various festivals include TIME SPANS [USA], Kontakte’19 [Germany], KNM Contemporaries [Germany], Harvard Group New Musik Series [USA], Kalv [Sweden], Sound of Stockholm [Sweden], Tzlil Meudcan [Israel], Klang [Denmark], DEGEM 30 years Celebration Concert [Germany], Electronic Music Studio at UC Berkeley [CNMAT], Electronic Music Studio at Stanford [CCRMA], Musik 21 Festival [Germany], No Hay Banda [Canada], Musik Futures [the UK], Tongyeong International Music Festival [South Korea], Barcelona Modern Music_Sampler Series, Crossroads International Music Festival [Austria], Levande Musik [Sweden], Festival Klub Katarkt [Germany], International’s Digitalkunst Festival [Germany], IGNM [Switzerland] and MA/IN Intermedia Festival [Italy] among others. Also, he will be/has been scholarships/fellowships and/or grants by such as Ernst von Simens Musik Foundation [Germany], Schloss Solitude [Germany], Musikfond e.V. [Germany], DCR Neustart Kultur [Germany], Goethe Institute Germany, Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur [Germany], Goethe Institute South Korea, Earl Brown Foundation [USA], Musik 21 Foundation e.V. [Germany], Georges Aperghis Commission Award [Greece], Culturele Activiteitenpremie' of the Flemish Government [Belgium], IGNM/ISCM/SIMC [Austria] and so on.

Matthias Klos (born 1969) lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria. Trained as a chef and brewer and maltster. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg from 1993 to 1999, master student. From 2002 to September 2009 artistic-scientific assistant at the Institute of Fine Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Art in Linz, Department of Experimental Design. 2010 to 2011 guest author for springerin and the online magazine artnet.de.

Numerous exhibitions and projects at the following institutions, among others: Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; Friedrich Kiesler Foundation, Vienna; University Galleries UC Irvine (USA), KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, Berlin; Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Salzburg Museum, Salzburg; Kunsthalle Krems, Künstlerhaus Vienna.

Matthias Klos was awarded the State Scholarship for Artistic Photography by the Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture in 2013, was a scholarship recipient of the State of Schleswig Holstein in 2018, and received the on the road again prize of the Austrian Cultural Forums for Berlin in 2021.

His work can be found in the collections of the Austrian Federal Government, the Wien Museum, the City of Linz, and the Salzburg Museum, as well as in private collections.

Yulia Marfutova, born in Moscow in 1988, studied German and history in Berlin and received her doctorate in Münster. Her first novel, "Der Himmel vor hundert Jahren", was on the longlist for the 2021 German Book Prize and was awarded the Buddenbrookhaus Debut Prize and the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Förderpreis. Yulia Marfutova lives in Boston.

Armin Schmitt, born in 1955, grew up in a Saarland village on the edge of Hunsrück. His childhood was shaped by Catholicism, the disliked school, the hilly countryside and working-class environment in which he grew up. One of his grandfathers was a miner, the other a steelworker, and his father a lathe operator. The women took care of the household. The introduction of BAföG opened the door to education for him, allowing him to study history, German language and literature, and art history. He wanted to become a teacher, but after his studies he first worked at the State Conservator's Office in Saarbrücken on the subject of industrial culture. Since then, cultural work has never left him. In addition to his work first as a teacher and then as a further educator over three decades, he was, among other things, artistic director of the schichtwechsel festival (1990–2003) at the Völklinger Hütte World Cultural Heritage Site, curated exhibitions in the Saarland state parliament and performed as a reciter. He is currently co-artistic director at KuBa – Kulturzentrum am Eurobahnhof (since 2007) in Saarbrücken. In the course of time, several publications have been produced, mainly in the fields of industrial culture and art. He has contributed to numerous didactic publications. Recently, he has been creatively engaged in the linking of image and text in the context of a "weekly book". Concise experiences on many journeys are currently reflected in an anthology of travel miniatures.
Lives and works in Saarbrücken.

Björn Siebert, born in 1978 in Hamburg, lives and works in Leipzig. He studied communication design and media art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe and photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig in the class of Timm Rautert. In 2010 he graduated as a master student in the master class of Timm Rautert and Christopher Muller. He has won several prizes and scholarships, including the prestigious Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation Prize for Contemporary German Photography in 2012, the Otto Steinert Prize of the German Society for Photography (DGPh) in 2013, and the Leipzig Annual Exhibition Prize in 2019. His work has been exhibited at the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, the Städtische Galerie & Kunstverein Speyer, the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, the Stadtgalerie Kiel, the Kunsthalle der Sparkasse Leipzig, the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and the Centre de la Photographie Geneva, among others. His works are represented in various collections and museums such as the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig and the Museum Folkwang in Essen. He is co-founder of the international artist group darktaxa. darktaxa-project sees itself as a working and discourse platform of artists working experimentally at the interface of photography and new digital imaging processes.

Aylin Ünal, born in 1986 in Berlin. She has been publishing her short prose regularly for several years in literary journals and anthologies as well as in literary competitions, including the Austrian zeilen.lauf competition. She has given readings and performances at venues including Lettrétage and Schwartzsche Villa in Berlin, as well as on Berlin's Radio Kultur.

She is a board member of Netzwerk Freie Literaturszene Berlin e.V. (NFLB) and a member of the literary group "Haus der unbedachten Wörter".

In addition to her work as a writer, Aylin Ünal studied social sciences at Humboldt University, including a study visit to Iceland, and completed a master's degree in European Societies at Freie Universität. She then worked for several years as an editor and project manager, and since 2020 as a programmer.

In her literary work, she is particularly interested in strong female protagonists striving for freedom and independence. She is currently working on her debut novel, which deals with the themes of home and identity. During her fellowship at Schloss Wiepersdorf, she hopes to complete the revision of her manuscript. Another novel is already in the planning stage.

Poet, editor, literary curator, literary critic

Born in 1986

Since beginning his literary career in 2008, Denis Larionov has sought to push the conventional boundaries of literature and literary criticism. As a poet and curator, he has worked extensively with electronic musicians (PIEZO, Alex Pleninger, Sergey Kasich) and academic composers (Sergey Nevskiy, Kirill Shirokov). He has also tried to get the conversation about contemporary literature (especially poetry) out into the open. While working in the Department of Contemporary Russian Literature at the Russian State Humanities University (РГГУ), he lectured on Russian poetry of the 1930s-2020s and its cultural and political connections with Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy and cinematography.

In 2010 he published numerous essays, reviews and articles on contemporary literary processes, poetry/prose writers (Mikhail Shishkin, Nikolai Kononov, Alexey Parshikov, Yuriy Leiderman, Yevgeny Kharitonov, etc.) and on the connections between literature and cinema (e.g. B. in the cinema by Kira Muratova). LGBTQ literature is of particular interest to him. He defended my master's thesis and wrote two articles on Evgeniy Kharitonov (1941-1981), a late Soviet writer of gay literature, and produced a series of interviews with contemporary poets on gender issues in literature (https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2018/1/net-nevazhnogo.html).

In 2011, together with colleagues, he organized Igitur, a discussion series on contemporary literature. At these events they analyzed poems by Hamdam Zakirov, Yuriy Leiderman, Polina Barskova, Galina Rymbu, Alexey Prokopiev and other Russian poets from different countries and regions.

In 2019, Irina Prokhorova invited him to work as a curator and editor of a series of fiction books in the New Literary Observer. There he published books by Alla Gorbunova, Oksana Vasyakina, Linor Goralik, Lev Rubinstein, A. Nune and others.Denis Larionov has published two volumes of poetry: Death of a Student (2013) and You Will Never Be Overtaken by This Movement (2018).

In his poetry he tries to combine a complex metaphorical perspective (inspired by Alexey Parshikov and Arkady Dragomoshenko) and a social and cultural analysis of human and non-human life forms in today's world. Body and corporeality are the main poetic concepts in his lyrics. As part of the "VERSschmuggel" project by the House of Poetry (2015), he translated some texts by the German poet Daniel Falb.

Education

2007-2012 Russian State Social University (Social Psychologist)

2012-2014 Russian State University of Humanities (Russian Anthropological School, MA)

2014-2019 Postgraduate courses at the Institute of Philosophy (Aesthetics)

Artistic activities

2008-2009 Participant of the VersLibre Festival (Moscow, St. Petersburg)

2010-2015 Participant of the festival of contemporary poetry, sound and visual art Poetronica

2012-2018 Curator of the literary event series Igitur (with Polina Barskova, Yurii Leiderman, Hamdam Zakirov, Sergey Zavyalov and many other guests)

2013          Death of a Student (first volume of poetry; shortlisted for Andrey Beliy's Award (2013)

2015          Participant of the German-Russian poetry project "VERSschmuggel" (with the support of the Goethe-Institut)

2018          You'll Never Be Overtaken By This Movement (Second Book Of Poetry)

Educational activities

2013          Workshop "Literary Criticism and Poetry Text"

2016          Gesture and lyrical text from Andrey Beliy to Evgeniy Kharitonov (a public lecture in Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod)

2017-2019 Assistant at the Department of Contemporary Russian Literature (Russian State University of Humanities)

2019-2022 Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Russian Literature (Russian State University of Humanities)

Jury activities

2013-2018 Creator of the poetry prize Difference (laureates: Oleg Yuriev, Vladimir Aristov, Polina Andrukovitch, Lida Yusupova, etc.)

2014-2017;

2020-2021 Appointer of the Arkadiy Dragomoshenko Prize

2016-2019 Committee member for the Andrey Beliy Award

Activities as a critic

2010-2021 Literary critic of the "New Literary Observer"

2011-2018 Literary critic and interviewer for "Lekhaim"

2011-2012 Literary critic for "Open Space"

2012-2017 Literary critic and interviewer "Colta"

Editorial activities

2014-2018 Co-editor of “L5”, a contemporary poetry website

2019-2022 Editor and creative curator of the "New Literary Observer" (series "Artistic Literature" and "Letters of a Russian Traveller")

Tanya Pioniker was born in Moscow in 1994. She began her exhibition activities at the age of 17 — in 2011, becoming the youngest participant in the special "START" project at Winzavod Center for Contemporary art. In 2014 she took part in the parallel program of the European Biennale Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg.

In 2017, the second personal exhibition "XVII" took place in VLADEY Space. The third solo exhibition "New ABC-book" (Gogol center) and the solo show of etchings "Seven" (JART Gallery) were held in 2021. She took part in many group shows, including a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art "One Family" as part of the "Cherry Forest" festival (2019).

In 2020, she was shortlisted for the ISCP residence, New York, USA. In collaboration with ciconia x ciconia Verlag (Berlin) she worked as an illustrator for books: "Mannelig in Ketten", 2022 (together with Ilya Danishevsky), "Leben mit einem Idioten", 2021 (together with Viktor Jerofejew).

The current interest of the artist is focused on the studies of the concept of the New Medievalism: this is an attempt to capture the current state of affairs — the time of total uncertainty and global processes.

Sergey Bratkov was born in 1960 in Kharkov, Ukraine. Graduated Repin Art College, Kharkov, Ukraine, 1978; Polytechnical Academy, Kharkov, Ukraine, 1983. In 1994 he organized "Fast reaction group" with Boris Michailov, Sergei Salonsky and Victoria Michailova. In 2010 took the first prize of the 5th Annual All-Russian Awards in the field of contemporary visual art "Innovation". Since 2000 he lives and works in Moscow, Russia. His projects have been presented in solo exhibitions at REGINA Gallery, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine; Kunstverein Rosenheim, Germany; Espacio Minimo Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Transit Gallery, Mechelen, Belgium; S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum for Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Gateshead, UK; Fotomuseum. Winterthur, Switzerland; Canal de Isabel II. Madrid, Spain; Deichtor Hallen. Aktuelle Kunst Haus der Photographie. Hamburg, Germany.

The artist also participated in group exhibitions, including National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Center for Contemporary Culture GARAGE, M' ARS Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Australia; Sem-Art Gallery, Monaco; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Centre for Contemporary Art 'Ujazdowski Castle' Warsaw, Poland; CAN, Neuchatel, Switzerland and at the biennials in Venice, San Paolo, Moscow and Rauma; Manifesta5, San Sebastian, Spain.

Elīna Zunde mostly works in drawing and painting mediums, but has also used photography, video, and spatial objects in her work. She has always been fascinated by the surrounding space and its changeability – as a source of opportunities and conditions. In her work she creates contact with this ever-changing order of things and being, searching for paths towards a united landscape.

Although she has followed the tradition of depiction in, for example, figurative art, especially drawing, she also explores the relationship between perception and its boundaries, as well as drawing in the broader sense.

Elīna lives and works in Riga. As a lecturer at the Department of Drawing at the Art Academy of Latvia She teaches figure drawing and since 2018 a specialized course on contextual composition in drawing. From 2008 to 2012 she taught at Riga School of Design and Art.

During the Residency in Schloss Wiepersdorf she’s going to develop a new series by working with symbols, basic elements in nature, their fundamentality and how it refers to the legacy of different cultures and ancient traditions, both the West and the East. She will thereby explore the figural expression intertwining and embodying them in biomorphic structures, geometric and architectural landscape formations. Her choice to work in traditional media (oil, pigments, tempera, pastel, ink) is closely related to the expanded importance she gives to matter as a carrier of information and structure of communication. She is also open to other media though (sound, object), particularly, in a form of collaboration.

Mattia Aisemberg is a composer and pianist from Berlin. He is currently studying composition with Manolis Vlitakis, classical piano with Lucas Blondeel and music pedagogy at the University of Arts Berlin. Before that, he got composition lessons from Stefan Lienenkämper and Samuel Andreyev, as well as jazz piano lessons from Tim Sund.

The search for intimate and at the same time thrilling timbral and harmonic combinations, as well as for new kinds of polyphony, play an important role in his compositional work. Reflecting on musical form and perception and most of all striving for artistic freedom, are always in the foreground of his creative practice.

For his piece „Les mots dans la gorge“ Mattia Aisemberg won the federal price at the composition competition „Jugend Komponiert 2022“. In the following year he got a commission to write a piece for the new music festival re-sonanz 2023 in Brandenburg.

Rahel v. Wroblewsky was born in 1964 in East Berlin. Professional training as a machine and plant fitter, studied philosophy. 3 children. Lives and works as an author, editor and lecturer in Berlin. Since 2021 she holds a teaching position for German for foreign nurses at the Berlin educational campus of Charité and Vivantes.

Rahel v. Wroblewsky writes prose, audio texts, and essays. Publications in magazines, newspapers, anthologies and radio. Her book "Protokoll eines Berliner Herbstes und Winters. Liebe.Kummer.Texte" was published by tredition in 2017.

She has received various grants and awards, including a working scholarship from the Berlin Senate (residency at Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf), the Alfred Döblin Fellowship from the Akademie der Künste, and a research grant from the Berlin Senate.

Most recently, she has published in the Berliner Zeitung on topics such as migration, exile and racism, which she has been dealing with for a long time.

Zora Janković was born in 1978 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008.

From 1998 to 2001 she studied at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome and from 2004 to 2008 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. There she completed her studies with a diploma in sculpture under Prof Andrea Grassi. From 2010 to 2015, she studied at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin and graduated with a diploma in sculpture under Prof Albrecht Schäffer. She graduated as a master student in 2016.

She has been working as a freelance artist since 2015.
She works mainly with the media of sculpture and photography, whose complex working processes form the initial starting point. The three-dimensional geometric moulding, the architectural fragment and its spatial structure are at the forefront of her artistic exploration. The contrasts between open and closed forms, their materiality and the relationship between mass and space also play an important role in her work. Her works are regularly represented in group and solo exhibitions.

Born and raised in Niigata, Japan, Manami Nagahari developed her interest in music at an early age when she played the trumpet and later the trombone in school bands. After studying at university in her home town, Manami Nagahari moved to Tokyo at the age of 23 for her office job. There she met Kumiko Hara (1954-2005), with whom she took singing and music theory lessons. This broadened the scope of her musical activities. At this time, she also began to experiment with music on her computer and wrote her first songs. Some of her early works, which she wrote together with Kenji Yamazaki, can be seen on games industries such as Playstations.

In 2006, she moved to Berlin. Since the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, her artistic focus has not only been on pure art, but also on political issues and ideas of social relevance. This is where her approach to music became more conceptual. Her long-standing collaboration with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and her participation in various media art and radio play festivals demonstrate her commitment to the broad field of experimental music.

She is currently working with classical musicians in her own notation and on a research project exploring other areas of sound.

Dilek Mayatürk was born in Istanbul in 1986 and continued her sociology studies at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in Austria. She has worked as a documentary film producer and author for various media. Her poetry collection "Cesaret Koleksiyonu" (Yeniinsan Verlag) was published in 2014, "Brache" (Hanser Berlin) in 2020 and "Bir Daha Yok Çiçeği" (Klaros Verlag) in 2021.

Dilek Mayatürk's bilingual literary work has been honoured with literary fellowships from institutions such as the Berlin Senate of Culture, the Cultural Foundation Schloss Wiepersdorf, Künstlerhaus Edenkoben, Kulturakademie Tarabya and Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung. She also received the Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı Honourable Mention (2010), the Gürhan Uçkan Poetry Award (2015) and third place in the Kemal Özer Poetry Awards (2021).

She thinks, writes and translates poetry in two languages. Mayatürk also performs with the multidisciplinary composer Amen Feizabadi in a sophisticated duo performance in which words and sounds enter into a dialogue with each other. She lives in Berlin.

Shira Miron is a Ph.D candidate at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation, titled “Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950,” follows the modern reconsideration of the old musical compositional technique of polyphony as a new aesthetic problem and potential beyond the musical context. Focusing on three historical conjunctures from the middle 18^th century to the second half of the 20^th century, the dissertation argues that the increasingly explicit debate on polyphony in and beyond the musical arena carried significant implications for the understanding of form and structure, communication, and society. Across this long durée, the project observes a reversal in the relationship between what it distills as “composition” and “community” through the lens of polyphony as an idea and technique. Among the authors and music theorists the dissertation brings into a new conversation are Baumgarten, Koch, Diderot, Rousseau, Simmel, Weber, Schonberg, Adorno, Broch, Boulez and Bachmann.

First fruits of this project were published in the Wiener Digitale Revue. Further publications appeared and are forthcoming in the Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies, Kleist-Jahrbuch and New German Critique.

Before joining the doctoral program at Yale, Shira Miron completed B.Mus and M.Mus degrees in piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and studied German literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Freie Universität Berlin, where she held several research fellowships.

During her fellowship at Schloss Wiepersdorf Shira Miron plans to develop a crucial link for her broader dissertation project through a focus on the Romantic Kunstlehre. Tracing the theoretical function ascribed to multi-vocal music in different treatises on art and aesthetics in German Romanticism, she will explore the ways in which polyphony might have been perceived as the “real” instantiation of the “ideal” and vice versa in the philosophy of subject, object, and intersubjectivity.

Barbara Schnalzger studied European cultural history in Augsburg and Vienna. She then moved to Leipzig in 2006. She completed the European Studies programme at the University of Leipzig and the University of Wroclaw/Poland.

In 2008, she co-founded the feminist editorial collective "oustide the box - Zeitschrift für feministische Gesellschaftskritik". In 2009/2010, Barbara Schnalzger worked as a cultural editor at Radio Târgu Mureș, Romania. Back in Germany, she worked at the Institute for Higher Education Research in Lutherstadt Wittenberg as part of the "Bundesbericht Wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs" before becoming managing director of the Leipzig Feminist Library and Archive MONAliesA in 2015. She has been a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Cultural Studies at Leipzig University since 2020. As part of her academic work, she was a Hannelore-Mabry Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich in 2022.

Barbara Schnalzger is a member of the working group on historical women's and gender studies and part of the archive and library network of the "i.d.a. umbrella organisation of all German-speaking lesbian/women's archives, libraries and documentation centres". She publishes regularly in "outside the box". She also publishes specialised articles on women's (movement) history. In her doctoral thesis, she is focussing on the history and significance of German-language lesbian/women's archives and libraries from the perspective of the history of knowledge.

Attila Bartis, born in 1968 in Marosvásárhely, Transylvania, Romania, is a Hungarian writer and photographer. He has lived and worked mainly in Budapest since 1984, and since 2014 occasionally in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia.

His books have been translated into over twenty languages. The novels "Der Spaziergang" (1999) and "Die Ruhe" (2005), both published by Suhrkamp, have been translated into German. The novel "Ruhe" was adapted into a film by Róbert Alföldi in 2008.
His photographic works are represented in photo exhibitions in Hungary, Romania and Poland. His theatre plays have been performed in theatres in Hungary, Romania and Austria. In 2016, Attila Bartis staged the play "Regie" 2016 at the National Theatre Marosvásárhely.

Attila Bartis has received several scholarships and literary prizes for his photographic and literary work, including the Tibor Déry Prize (1997) and the Sándor Márai Prize (2002). In 2006, the author was a guest of the lcb, and in 2007 of the DAAD's Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme.

Literary works:

Novels: "The Walk" (1995), "Rest" (2001), "The End" (2015)
Short stories: "The Bluish Haze" (1998), "The Lazarus Apocrypha" (2005)
Conversations: "About what we can" (2010, with István Kemény)
Diary fragments about photography: "The trail of lost time" (2019)

Photo albums:

"Silence as" (2010)
"Description of the world, detail" (2016)
"On the islands" (2018)
"Dear Unknown" (2021)

Theatre plays:

"My Mother, Cleopatra" (2003)
"Decay" (2005)
"Direction" (2013)

Born in 1962 in Worms, Germany, Fides Becker studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (1981-85), the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam (1985-88) and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (1986-89). She lived in Rotterdam from 1985 to 1996 and since then in Berlin.

Her academic career has included teaching assignments at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee (2013) and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (2017). In 2015, she worked as a mentor for female visual artists in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Fides Becker has received several grants and awards, including an artist-in-residence grant in Paris (2010), the International Studio and Curatorial Programme in New York (2005), a travel grant to New York from the Hessische Kulturstiftung (2004) and a grant from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (1983).

Her works are exhibited in solo exhibitions such as "Der feine Unterschied" at Kunstverein Worms (2023) and "Patina der Zeit" at Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main (2017) and in group exhibitions such as "Touch of playfulness" at Stiftung Rheinbeckhallen, Berlin (2023), "FLUX4ART", Casa Tony M., Wittlich (2021), "Bringen Scherben Glück?", curated by Susanne Ahner and Anja Teske at the Projektraum Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen 1867, Berlin (2023).

Fides Becker's works are represented in collections, including the SØR Rusche Collection Oelde/Berlin, the Kunsthalle Emden and the Deutsche Bank Collection in Frankfurt am Main.

Konrad H. Roenne, born in 1979 in Rüdersdorf near Berlin, is the father of two daughters. After leaving school, he did his civilian service in a retirement home and continued his academic career by studying in Berlin. Roenne gained professional experience at Vice magazine and in an institution for the mentally ill.

In 2010, he was awarded a scholarship at the Jürgen Ponto Foundation's writing workshop. His prose and essays have been published in anthologies and magazines such as Bella Triste, Lichtungen and Merkur. In 2022, he made his debut with his novel "Hoch Mittag", which deals with topics relating to senior citizens, horses and medication.

Roenne has been honoured with several awards, including the Wuppertal Literature Biennale Prize, a work and research grant from the Berlin Senate and the Alfred Döblin Scholarship from the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

Igor Tereshkov, born in 1989 in Energodar, Ukraine, is a multidisciplinary artist, visual researcher and documentary photographer based in Montenegro.
Working in mixed medium including installation, performance, documentary and post-documentary photography, he experimented with different photo processes and alternative developing. He studied documentary photography and photojournalism in 2017 at School of Modern Photography Docdocdoc in Saint-Petersburg (Russia) and graduated from the course "Experiences of Contemporary Photography" in 2019.

Tereshkov received several prizes and grants, his works have been exhibited and published worldwide. He received the Project Launch Grant from CENTER Awards (USA) for his work “Oil and Moss” in 2019, he was nominated to Prix HSBC pour la Photographie (France) in 2020 and was one of the selected artists for FOAM TALENT (Netherlands) in 2021. In 2022 Oil and Moss series was exhibited in the Documentary Photographic Center — ImageSingulières (Sete, France). His current work “Red Heat” was exhibited in Schwab Museum (Biel/Bienne, Switzerland) as part of Bieler Fototage photo festival in 2022.

Darja Linder, born in Russia in 1992, grew up in Düren, North Rhine-Westphalia, and currently lives and works in Saarbrücken.

Her figurative paintings are peppered with visual codes that relate to the world of experience of her generation - from dating apps and television series to internet phenomena such as "cringe culture". The colourful and garish aesthetics play with the late capitalist longing for oversaturation and abundance.
However, it acts as a false bottom, behind which painful themes are often hidden. Questions are raised about class, gender and migration. Linder observes the connections between political (power) structures and individual desires and examines in her works how these desires reach deep into our identities.

In her current project "PostOstBestWest", she uses multimedia to explore the feeling of being uprooted and the double experience of foreignness that she shares with those who moved to Germany as children from the former USSR, the "Mitgenommenen".
The paintings and audio works overflow with sensory impressions and Western pop culture, just like the first moments in Germany. The works create bittersweet visual worlds between capitalism and socialism, between trauma and escape from reality, between violence and lost childhood, between insecurity and self-determination.

Graduate of the Film and Television School at Tel Aviv University, Shachar Magen has worked as the editor of Ynet’s Culture section, and directed the documentary films The mother of the Gevatron, Life Stories and Strange Death. In 2006, Keter published his first novel, Black Slaughter, which was nominated for the Sapir Prize for Literature.

He is the creator and main writer for the daily drama series Exposes. He is also the creator and main screenwriter for the drama series The Prime minister's children, and screenwriter for Hagai Levy’s series The Accursed. In 2014, his thriller series, Sirens, was released. The series deals with the siren's myth and has three seasons. The series has a Russian version and now working on American version. He also the creator and main writer of Possessions, a French and Israeli series, which first aired on Canal plus and Yes TV during 2020. The series written with Valeire Zanatti, directed by BAFTA-nominated Thomas Vincent (“Bodyguard”) and was shot in Israel in French, Hebrew and English. The series won the best tv series by the french critics (Syndicat Francais) and also aired on HBO Max.  In 2023 his second novel, "Land Of The Monasteries", was published. The book was nominated for the Sapir Prize for Literature (long list). The book is being adapted into a TV series which is a co-production of Hot and Paramount Plus and will be broadcast in Israel and the USA.

Matthias Nawrat was born in Opole/Poland in 1979 and emigrated with his family to Bamberg in Upper Franconia at the beginning of 1989. He studied biology in Heidelberg and Freiburg im Breisgau, then literary writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. He worked as a freelance science journalist. He has lived as a freelance writer in Berlin since 2012. He published short stories, essays, excerpts from his diary and the novels “Wir zwei allein” (2012), “Unternehmer” (2014), “Die vielen Tode unseres Opas Jurek” (2015), “Der traurige Gast” (2019) and “Reise nach Maine” (2021). His first volume of poetry “Gebete für meine Vorfahren” was published in 2022, and “Über allem ein weit Himmel - Nachrichten aus Europa”, a collection of travel essays, in 2024. His books have earned him the European Union Prize for Literature and the Fontane Literature Prize from the city of Neuruppin and the state of Brandenburg, among others.

The residency program “Seen from afar - Encounters in Brandenburg” is a cooperation project of the Brandenburg Literature Council and the Literary Colloquium Berlin. It takes place as part of “Connecting Worlds - Kulturland Brandenburg 2024/2025”. Kulturland Brandenburg 2024/2025 is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Planning of the State of Brandenburg. With the kind support of the Brandenburg Sparkassen and the Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg.

Jeanna Kolesova (*1988 in Moorland Village, Russia) is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. They work predominantly with moving image, performance, web, installation, and text. Their works reflect on the manipulation of history and information and the influence of imperial technologies on human and non-human bodies and landscapes.

Kolesova studied documentary film and photography in St. Petersburg, interactive media at California Institute of the Arts, and experimental film and new media at the Berlin University of Arts. Their works have been exhibited at the Fotograf Festival in Prague (2024), Berliner Ringtheater (2024), Kunstraum Kreuzberg (2024), nGbK in Berlin (2023), EMOP Berlin (2023), HYBRID Biennale in Dresden (2022), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2021), and at the Photography Museum in Berlin (2021). Kolesova was awarded a KUNSTFONDS scholarship in 2024 and Karl Hofer Scholarship in 2023. They participated in the Berlin Goldrausch artist program in 2024. Kolesova belongs to various artistic-political groups.

Gerhardt Müller-Goldboom was born in London and grew up in Berlin. He studied composition, musicology and double bass, also in Berlin. After a scholarship period at the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he began his musical career as an instrumentalist and was a member of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for several years. Today he works as a composer and conductor.

His works have been performed at international festivals for contemporary music. The AKO Studio in Tokyo and the Experimental Intermedia Festival New York have dedicated portrait concerts to him. His list of works includes compositions for conventional instruments in various formations as well as electronic realisations. He is currently writing an opera based on Ovid's Metamorphoses.

As a conductor, Müller-Goldboom, who has experience as Kent Nagano's assistant, is mainly dedicated to contemporary music and has premièred numerous works. He is co-founder and has since been director of the ensemble work in progress – Berlin and has guest-conducted numerous formations in Germany and abroad. His opera performances of Pousseur's ‘Votre Faust’ and Marc André's ‘...22,13...’ have attracted international attention. He is also committed to older music. In 2019, he was the first German conductor to lead the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra's Holocaust Memorial Concert, which included works by Joseph Haydn and Gustav Mahler.

Dorothee Schabert is a composer and composer. She studied history, philosophy and German language and literature in Freiburg, graduating with a state examination in 1977. In 1985, she graduated from the HdK Berlin Music Academy with a degree in sound engineering, including compositional subjects. After a period of freelance work and starting a family at the same time, she took up a permanent position as a sound engineer for SWR2 Musik in Baden-Baden in 1992. Here, Dorothee Schabert was responsible for productions for radio and CDs with the SWR-SO under renowned conductors and well-known soloists, chamber music and, above all, contemporary compositions. With the SWR Experimental Studio and its director André Richard, she produced Luigi Nono's electro-acoustic works for SACD and radio.

At the same time, she created compositions for instruments and voices in various formations. Dorothee Schabert has been commissioned by Ensemble Aventure, Capella de la Torre, members of the SWR-SO, acousmatic works and sound installations, among others. She regularly works in co-operation with artists from other artistic fields. Her compositions have been performed in Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Cologne, Darmstadt, Rome, New York etc. ALso, she produced a CD with Ensemble Resonanz, HH.

Together with the clarinettist M. Schulz, Dorothee Schabert conceives and organises the ‘Salon pour ... ‘ series, in which they present female composers of the past in dialogue with contemporary composers. With lectures and essays, she works as a theorist on contemporary music, especially on space and spatial aesthetics. Schabert received a scholarship from the German Academy Rome (Villa Massimo) in Olevano in 2020.

Luna Ali was born in Syria in 1993 and studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice in Hildesheim, literary writing at the German Literature Institute Leipzig and anthropology at the University of Leipzig. She has worked as an author on productions at the Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Hanover theatres and in Berlin, among others. In 2023 she received the working scholarship for German-language literature from the Berlin Senate Department. In 2024, her debut novel ‘Da waren Tage’ was published by S. Fischer. She lives in Berlin

Tabea Lamberti is a literary scholar. She studied at Otto Friedrich University in Bamberg, where she completed the Bavarian State Exam for secondary school teaching as well as her bachelor's and master's degrees in German studies, art history, and history. After graduating, she worked as a gallery manager at an art gallery in Leipzig. From October 2021 to December 2024, she was a doctoral fellow in the DFG-funded graduate program Modelling Romanticism in Jena. Her dissertation explores Christa Wolf’s reception of Romanticism.

During her studies, she served as editor-in-chief of the student magazine Rezensöhnchen and co-editor of the literary anthology fortississimo. Bamberger Edition Junger Texte. In 2020, she received the Gender Award for Outstanding Female Students from Otto Friedrich University. Since 2022, she has been a member of #breiterkanon | Kanondiskussionen in Literaturwissenschaft, Feuilleton und auf dem Buchmarkt, led by Dr. Martina Wernli. As part of her doctoral work, she examines questions of poetics and aesthetics in female authorship, both in the Romantic era and in the GDR. Her research interests also include gender and queer studies, contemporary (post-migrant) literature, and auto-socio-biographical writing.

Lukas Zittlau was born in Berlin in 1995. After longer stays abroad in Ecuador and Tajikistan, he began studying political science in Marburg in 2015, which he continued at the University of Roma Tre. In 2018, he startet a Master's degree in Religion and Culture at Humboldt University Berlin. During this time, he worked on the assembly line in Wolfsburg, as a drinks vendor in a football stadium and as a ticket collector at the Volksbühne theatre on Rosa Luxemburg-Platz. Most recently, he also published and produced for jungle world and rbb. Since 2023, he has been working on his doctorate at the Faculty of Literature on the intellectual biography of the philosopher Wolfgang Heise.

In his dissertation, Lukas Zittlau attempts to trace Heise's intellectual movement from the tension between communist conviction and practical disillusionment. Above all, however, he pursues the goal of using Heise's philosophical and literary-historical production to reopen his circular thinking, which constantly integrates new contradictions.

Heise's perpetual search for truth in art also took place in Wiepersdorf: Here, the philosopher and aesthetician came across a ‘network of friendships that will not be mentioned in any future history book, but which stretched across the whole country and helped us to live’, as Christa Wolf put it. Visualising this network is the task that Lukas Zittlau has set himself for his stay in Wiepersdorf.

Priya Kumari, born in India, is a Doctoral candidate and Senior Research Fellow at Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She holds her Bachelors and Masters in Literature of German speaking countries. Her research interest lies at the intersection of culture and literary Studies, Black and Afro-German Literature, Memory, Guilt, Identity and Recognition politics in German speaking literary and cultural productions and literary translation.

She has written MPhil. dissertation titled “Identitäts- und Kulturkrise in Lucia Engombes Autobiographie Kind Nr. 95. Meine deutsch-afrikanische Odyssee”. Her PhD. project titled “Die Politik der Identität, Anerkennung und Integration in der ausgewählten Schwarzen-Deutschen Literatur” focuses on the cultural theory of Similarity and Difference with respect to the politics of memory studies, colonial amnesia, decolonization, integration and transcultural identity of Black Germans in German society. She is the recipient of fellowships like Baden-Württemberg Stipendium (2020) for her research stay at Universität Konstanz; DAAD University Summer School-HSK 2017 at the Institute für Internationale Kommunikation e.V. in Berlin (IIK Berlin) and also participated in international summer schools at Universität Bielefeld, Germany (2017-2018).

She has been awarded “Best Translation Prize” for translating Mascha Kaléko’s poem Heimweh, wonach? into Hindi Viyog, Kis Griha Ka? by the Goethe Society of India in 2018. She has also organized a workshop and presented her research in the Postdoc-Symposium titled “Ähnlichkeit als theoretisches Paradigma und ästhetische Praxis” (2024) at the Centre of German Studies, JNU, India, which is in the process of publication.

Paula Müller was born in Trier in 1977 and currently lives in Berlin. She studied fine art at the Kunstakademie Münster under Prof Ulrich Erben and later under Prof Daniele Buetti, with whom she graduated as a master student in 2007. Continuous work as a scientific draughtswoman for archaeologists in Germany and abroad (e.g. LWL Münster, Université de Genève) deepened the documentary method of drawing, which became a central element of her artistic work.

Paula Müller creates new spaces by drawing on walls and installing her own pictures into the drawings. Thus, they enter into dialogue with each other and with the space. Her works combine drawing and painting to create a visual language that makes questions, thoughts, and aphorisms visually tangible. The diverse forms of expression resemble found objects that document their own origins. Searching and questioning are the driving force and inspiration behind her artistic work.

From 2008 to 2012, Paula Müller lived and worked in New York (Kunststiftung NRW working grant), Brussels and Geneva, among other places. She has presented her site-specific works in numerous museums and galleries in Germany, Belgium, the USA, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Luxembourg, and Russia. In the process, she has repeatedly explored found pictorial objects and snapshots.

Since 2013, teaching has played a relevant role in her artistic work. Among other things, she taught ‘Visual Field Research’ at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the TU Berlin and Humboldt University (2013-2018). From 2018 to 2020, she was Head of Education and Outreach at the Stade Museums, where she developed innovative art education programs.

Marion Cziba, born in 1973 at the Rhine, studied Fine Art at the Saar University of Fine Arts (HBKsaar) from 2012 to 2018 under Prof. Daniel Hausig, Prof. Katharina Hinsberg and Prof. Georg Winter and completed her master's degree in 2020.

She is a winner of the Peter and Luise Hager Prize (1st place), was awarded the Artmix10 residency fellowship from the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture and the state capital Saarbrücken, the Germany Scholarship and a scholarship from the Kunstfonds Foundation as part of Neustart Kultur. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, such as “Kunst trotz(t) Corona” in the Saarland state parliament, the “International Light Art Award” at the Zentrum für Lichtkunst Unna and the state art exhibition “Saarart11”, and has also had solo exhibitions at various art associations such as the Saarländisches Künstlerhaus and the Galerie Junge Kunst Trier. She curated the “Kunstkapelle im Cusanushaus” for two years, worked for three years in the HBKsaar university gallery under the direction of Prof. Matthias Winzen and held a teaching position in 2019.

Marion Cziba lives and works in Saarbrücken. She is a member of the Saarländisches Künstlerhaus and has been involved in the regional art scene on the board of the Saarländischer Künstlerbund since 2024, for which she curated a performative exhibition format for the first time with “Living in a box”.

Ursula Knoll, born in Vienna in 1981, received her doctorate in German Studies at the University of Vienna and trained as a playwright at the Burgtheater Vienna and the wiener wortstaetten. Longer research stays in Bishkek, Washington DC and Prague followed. Her plays have been published by Schultz&Schirm, Hartmann&Stauffacher and Kaiser Verlag.

In 2022, her debut novel “Lektionen in dunkler Materie” was published by Edition Atelier and won the Blogger Prize for Literature in 2023. This was followed in 2025 by the novel “Zucker”, which was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize. 2023 she received the LiterarMechana scholarship. In 2021 she was a fellow of the Tour des Textes (NIDS Berlin / Theatertexter*innen München / wiener wortstaetten). In 2010 she was a Raoul Hilberg PhD fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, in 2009 she received the Thomas Bernhard Scholarship from the Landestheater Linz.

Bettina Gärtner was born in Frankfurt (Main) in 1962 and has lived in Vienna since early childhood. She studied law and history studies withour graduating, briefly studied journalism, then trained and worked as a freelancer in graphics and production.

Bettina Gärtner began publishing in literary magazines in 2008 and received a state scholarship for literature from the bm:ukk for her work on the novel Unter Schafen (2015), which was then awarded the 2015 Author's Prize for particularly successful debuts by the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt. Her work on the novel Herrmann (2020) was supported by a project grant for literature from the Federal Chancellery.

Most recently, she has mainly published essays, including Egofiles 01 to 04 and Jedermanns Sache (Dear Hater).

Netalie Gvirtz is an Israeli author and literary editor at Am Oved publishing house. She has published three novels and eight books for children and teens. Gvirtz also serves as editor-in-chief of Adam Tza’ir magazine. Her novel The Volunteer (Keter, 2021) was nominated for the Sapir Prize for Literature.

Lukas Doil is a historian at the University of Potsdam and the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History. He is conducting research on the transformation of work in German contemporary history, with a scholarship from the Hans Böckler Foundation until the end of 2025. In his dissertation, which he plans to complete at Schloss Wiepersdorf, he examines the history of precarious work using the example of temporary work in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1970s. Using a discourse analysis grounded in social history, the work examines the reasons for the rise of temporary work from its illegality in the 1960s to its role as a key instrument of the most consequential social reform of the recent past (“Agenda 2010”). The focus is on questions of subjectification, migrantization, control, deregulation, and transformation.

He has published on the history of labor, gender and cultural history, and public history, and has been awarded the Faculty Prize of the University's Faculty of Philosophy, among other honors. He is an active volunteer in the Education and Science Union in Brandenburg and is also committed to a critical culture of remembrance.

After practicing Classical, Jazz and Afro-Cuban percussion, Pierre Fourré moved on to the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMDP), where he obtained Bachelor and Master's degree cum sum laudae in Musical Composition. He also studied analysis, orchestration, music history, medieval counterpoint and conducting. He strives to create music that bridges different worlds, influenced by his experiences with jazz, hip-hop, and fusion, as well as his encounters with Indian, Balinese, and African music.

His music has been performed by ensemble interContemporain, Ensemble Aleph, OLC, musicians from the CNSMDP, KCB and the HEM in Geneva and Lausanne, and conducted by Léo Margue, Clara Baget, Kyrian Freidenberg and Jean-Philippe Wurtz.

As an artistic director and advisor, he worked with conductor Clara Baget, pianist and composer Charles Heisser, pianist Marina Saiki, and double bassist and improviser Jules Bauer de Milleret.

His work received unanimously First prize by Tristan Murail & Yvan Fedele at the 5th Kazakhstan International Composition Competition, Special prize at the 3rd Ise-Shima International Composition Competition, Coup de Coeur of the Académie Charles Cros, the SACEM and the SACD Prize.

Pierre Fourré has been nourished by French poetics and Italian rigor. He searches for what silence has to say to us in the poetics of the body and in the outpouring of song.

Roee Joseph (b. 1993) is a playwright, director, performance maker, and researcher specializing in independent documentary theater. His work combines poetic language, documentary materials, and performative inquiry into personal, ethical, and political realities. He writes and directs his own plays, including Shura: The Mission of Identifying Life (Israel Festival 2024), based on his reserve duty identifying victims after the October 7 massacre; Hereby I Declare (with Noa Nassie), which reopens a military investigation Roee himself conducted during his service; and Good Morning Hedgehog, an LGBTQ-themed play exploring intimacy and estrangement. His plays have been presented at Tmuna Theater and the Sibiu Festival, and translated into English and German.

Roee received the Rosenblum Prize for Promising Creator (2024) and the Golden Hedgehog Award for Best Play (2022). He holds a B.Ed.F.A in Theatre Directing and an M.A. in Cultural Studies. He is a lecturer at the School of Performing Arts at the Kibbutzim College of Education and a PhD fellow in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University. His doctoral research explores how rented apartments shape urban identity and cultural life in Tel Aviv.

Olha Lihus is a musicologist, Ph.D. in Art Studies, and an Associate Professor at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University. In 1994, she graduated from the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music in Kyiv, Ukraine, and earned her Ph.D. in 2014. She is the author of the books Ukrainian Piano Music of the 19th – Early 20th Century in the Context of European Romanticism (2017, in Ukrainian) and Music in Choreography (2021, in Ukrainian), as well as over 40 scholarly publications in Ukrainian and English. Her research interests include Ukrainian Romanticism within the European cultural context and Modernist and Postmodern discourse in Ukrainian music of the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2023, Olha received a non-residential fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. From October 2023 to March 2024, she was a visiting scholar at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany.

Naomi Pinnock was born in West Yorkshire, Great Britain, in 1979. She studied in London with Harrison Birtwistle and Brian Elias, and in Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm. Her music has been performed internationally by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique Luxembourg, Quatuor Bozzini, Ensemble Adapter, London Sinfonietta, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, Arditti Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, and Schola Heidelberg, among others. Performances have taken place at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Warsaw Autumn, ECLAT Festival Stuttgart, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Tectonics Festival Glasgow, Klangspuren Schwaz, ACHT BRÜCKEN, Rainy Days Festival Luxembourg, and Ultraschall Berlin, among others.

In 2022, she received the prestigious Composition Award from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. In 2020, she won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition for I am, I am. Other awards include the 2017 Berlin Working Scholarship for New Music and Sound Art, the Cité des arts Paris Composition Scholarship in 2015/6, the Günther Bialas Composition Prize in 2013, and the Berlin-Rheinsberg Composition Prize in 2010.

In 2020, her first portrait CD, Lines and Spaces, was released on WERGO/Deutsche Musikrat.

She lives and works in Biel/Bienne.

Dennis Schäfer is a writer, scholar, and book collector who has been a Ph.D. student at Princeton University. Dennis is interested in media cultures from the late 18^th to the early 20^th century and has a particular focus on the literature and legacy of German Romanticism.

His academic essays and book reviews have appeared, or are slated to appear, in a variety of periodicals (e.g. E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch, Goethe Jahrbuch, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie) and he co-edited special issues in Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert and the Publications of the English Goethe Society as well as an anthology on E.T.A. Hoffmann adaptations. In the past, he has been a fellow with the Goethe Gesellschaft Weimar, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and received Princeton’s 2023 Research Prize.

Since 2022, Dennis has been examining the Bettina von Arnim estate at the Morgan Library & Museum. He will dedicate his time as a Wiepersdorf Fellow to make his research on the Arnim Family Archive more publicly accessible.

Taslima Ahmed is a British-German painter living and working in Berlin. She exhibited at the the Rathaus-Galerie Reinickendorf in 2025, Haus am Lützowplatz in 2024 and the Westfälischer Kunstverein in 2023.

Ahmed paints both analogue and digitally. In recent years however she has concentrated on the question: how can you paint using purely technological means?

Her work includes painting purely digitally and developing a new unique way of printing layers to create painterly texture, impasto and thick brushstrokes by repurposing the regular use of an industrial printer. Her current series of paintings, called ‘Non-Analogue Paintings’ show detailed figurative motives, a progression from her previous exploration of gestural colour abstraction in her ‘Canvas Automata’ series and black and white minimalism in her group of works called ‘Reconstructor Paintings’.