Summer Academy Libken No. 9 – 2026

The one-week interdisciplinary Summer Academy in Libken is an invitation to live and work artistically together, detached from familiar environments and structures. For the ninth year, the Summer Academy takes place at the Libken artist residency, a prefabricated apartment building with a large garden area in the rural Uckermark region.

The theme of this year’s Summer Academy is The Collective Space and the SELF — an exploration through the artistic practices of ceramics, photography, painting, performance, text, and conversation. How do we want — and how are we able — to work and act artistically today in a time of cultural budget cuts, war, climate crisis, and social polarization?

The Summer Academy at the Libken artist residency sees itself as a laboratory, an experimental space, and a collective site for thinking and working in the Uckermark — in the countryside of eastern Germany. In a region shaped by ruptures, reinterpretations, and contradictory social experiences.

Starting from this specific place, the Summer Academy raises questions of appropriation, responsibility, and giving back: What does it mean to approach a place artistically, to inhabit it temporarily, and to live and work together within it? What does it mean to experiment with solidaric forms of living and working together in a prefabricated apartment building?

At the center are questions of individuality and collectivity, of artistic authorship and shared practice. After extensive research, does one begin to feel like a foreign body, with the desire to retreat into one’s familiar bubble? Are we thrown back onto ourselves, or do we experience permeability? How much honesty, curiosity, and genuine interest are needed for an artistic process not only to emerge from a place, but also to give something back to it?

We want to explore Libken as a specific resonant space: as a rural place in eastern Germany where history, the present, structural change, political tensions, and questions of belonging collide directly. Especially here, the question arises of how discourse is still possible today: How can we speak controversially with one another, endure differences, and nevertheless move toward each other — even when political viewpoints differ greatly?

In this way, the Summer Academy also connects to artistic and social debates currently being discussed internationally, for example at this year’s Venice Art Biennale: questions of representation, witnessing, documentation, community, experiences of crisis, and the role of art in a fragile present. At the same time, the focus is deliberately shifted away from large international exhibition formats back to the concrete place itself: to Libken, the Uckermark, everyday coexistence, attentive observation, and careful listening.

A special role is played by artistic-documentary work — not as mere representation of reality, but as an artistic practice of observing, collecting, questioning, and making visible. Between subjective perception and collective reality, new forms of artistic research and engagement emerge.

A wide range of artistic approaches and connections between them are possible: ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, text, voice, performance, as well as experimental and documentary formats. Libken thus becomes an open workspace for artistic research and collective practice — for the attempt to relate to one another and to test new forms of working, living, and storytelling beyond everyday structures and conditions. We strive for a collective and egalitarian space in which we can learn together and from one another, and discuss our own work and the work of other participants with appreciation and respect.

The Summer Academy concludes with a celebration and a public presentation on September 5, 2026: the extensive grounds and spaces of Libken offer diverse possibilities for different presentation formats, which can be developed collectively and individually.

Working Together in Libken

Active participation in organizing and carrying out all collective activities, as well as a willingness to engage in communal processes, forms the foundation of our collective living and working in Libken. Furthermore, we understand the Libken Summer Academy as a space of respectful and discrimination-sensitive interaction, and we clearly position ourselves against all forms of exclusion, racism, and antisemitism.

Costs: 600 euros per person,
including accommodation, materials, and full vegan-vegetarian catering.

We offer one or two solidarity-based places for people in precarious living situations. If your circumstances allow it, please choose the full price. By doing so, you also enable workshop participants with fewer financial resources to take part.

Concept and Organization: Sophia Kesting in cooperation with Susanne Kim and Katharina Reinsbach