The Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Koordinierungsstelle Erinnerungskultur der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart are awarding two artistic residency fellowships of six months each in the period from July 2026 to June 2027. The fellowships are aimed at both international artists and artists from the Stuttgart area from the fields of visual arts and art in public space. The aim is to produce a site-specific artistic work in public space that promotes the mediation and accessibility of one or more specific sites of forced labor for urban society.
The project Forced Labor/en – Work Force/d focuses on places of forced labor under National Socialism in Stuttgart as part of an artistic exploration. Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of people from all over Europe were deployed as forced laborers in Stuttgart – in industry, construction, agriculture, public institutions and private households, often under inhumane conditions. The sites of this forced labor were part of everyday life in the city. Many still exist today, but are barely recognizable as places of violence, exploitation and disenfranchisement.
As part of the residencies, these places are to be made legible again through artistic interventions and mediation formats – not as closed historical locations, but as spaces that are questioned anew in today’s urban space and negotiated together. What stories, traces and ruptures are inscribed in them? How do the experiences of forced labor continue to have an impact on biographies, family memories and social structures to this day? And how can references to current forms of forced, dependent or precarious labor be established from these historical sites – without simple equations, but with a critical awareness of continuities and shifts?
The culture of remembrance is understood as an open, dialogical process that only unfolds in the encounter between artistic practice, historical research and urban society in the public space. The artistic works and accompanying mediation formats are intended to open up spaces in which different experiences, memories and perspectives come together – and in which the history of forced labor can be intertwined anew with today’s questions of work, migration, exploitation and responsibility, also in a global context.
The scholarship includes:
– a six-month stay in Stuttgart, optionally divided into two periods
– a monthly stipend of € 1,300
– a furnished living and working studio at Akademie Schloss Solitude
– one-off reimbursement of travel costs for arrival and departure
– project funding of € 5.000 per fellowship (for research and production)
– assumption of health insurance costs for non-EU citizens
– exchange with an international, multidisciplinary fellowship community
– participation in Akademie events
– support for local and regional networking
– use of the workshops (wood, metal, video editing/VR) and libraries
Application deadline: March 16, 2026