fresh air #8

On three floors and 1,100 square metres, the Berliner Leben Foundation has set up eleven flats in Schöneberger Norden, which offer up to 13 artists a year the space to concentrate on their creative process for a period of 12 months as part of the Fresh A.I.R. scholarship programme.

The funding gives the scholarship holders the opportunity to absorb new impulses during their stay and to develop artistically while being integrated into Berlin's cultural life and to gain important experience for their further professional career. The Stiftung Berliner Leben supports artistic projects that, in addition to focusing on changing thematic complexes, are also oriented towards the three funding priorities of site-specificity, social commitment and originality.

The 8th year of Fresh A.I.R. runs under the title "LINGUISTIC XPEDITION". It takes up the traditions of the artistic-literary avant-gardes that dealt experimentally with language, such as Italian Futurism or multinational Dadaism. This also includes the subsequent interdisciplinary and cultural-critical currents such as French Lettrism or Russian Transfurism, among others.

This year, the speech act as a constitutive element of human perception and communication will be examined. The examination and generation of verbal language actions are just as much of interest as the analysis of language thinking and language action. Aspects of current debates on the structural power of language, language-critical standards or the enforcement of discrimination-free language are to be advanced in creative ways. In addition, the scriptural form of language is not left unnoticed and potential forms of development of written language are to be worked out experimentally.

Funding is available for:

Projects that test an experimental approach to spoken language and in which the participatory involvement of local language actors is taken into account.

Projects that examine aspects of everyday language use and/or language and its communicative potential, critically reflecting on them in linguistic-artistic-performative or autonomous, typographic forms of expression.

Projects that focus on the further development of written language (expressiveness, functionality, etc.) or rethink linguistic signs in digital space (multimodality, interactivity, etc.).