A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN | Libken Space Grant

„A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.“
Virginia Woolf

Almost 100 years have passed since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s world-famous feminist essay, yet what she wrote still holds true today: anyone who wants to be creative — regardless of gender or other circumstances — needs time, space, and the necessary resources to pursue their ideas and develop their work.

Libken does not always have funding available for paid residency grants. Nevertheless, we want to support artists, thinkers, and activists in their work whenever possible. For this reason, Libken regularly announces space grants on an irregular basis. This means that we provide one of our apartments free of charge for you and your project for a limited period of time. We are able to offer A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN – Libken Space Grant whenever a temporary vacancy arises in one of our apartments.

In addition to the studio apartment, you can also use the Libken grounds, the library, our covered outdoor workspace, and, depending on availability, the Waterworks for your work. Anyone who would like to share their work in some form (a reading, sharing session, or small exhibition) or leave a publication for the library is warmly invited to do so, though this is entirely optional.

Current calls for space grants are always posted here on our website and on Instagram.

Libken Space Grant #8

We are awarding Libken Space Grant #8 for the period from June 16–30, 2026.

You are welcome to stay for the entire period or for a shorter stay of at least one week within these dates.

To apply, please send us a maximum one-page A4 statement by June 10 at 6:00 pm, explaining why you need a room of your own, what you would like to work on at Libken, and whether or how you would like to share your work. Sharing your work is not a requirement for receiving the grant.

Please send your application with the subject line “Space Grant #8” to:

contact@libken.de

No additional materials are required. Unfortunately, we are unable to cover travel or food expenses.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and will get back to applicants as soon as possible.

Please only apply if you are able to stay for at least one week during the period stated above.

Past Residencies

Christiane Bergelt

Christiane Bergelt received her MA in Fine Art/Painting from Chelsea College of Art in London, supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation, and studied free painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg under Prof. Christine Colditz and as a master student under Prof. Thomas Hartmann. With scholarships from the DAAD and the State of Brandenburg, Bergelt completed working stays in Iceland and at Wiepersdorf Castle. Christiane Bergelt was awarded the Young Artists’ Prize for Fine Arts in 2017 and the Working Scholarship of the State of Brandenburg in 2020. In 2022, she will receive the Neustart Kultur Scholarship from the Kunstfonds Foundation.

PREP___ io credo
WORK__ kommen lassen

A space for myself with imitation marble, fake trompe l’œil thoughts,
poems yet to write, preparatory drawings, dorky darke text images and Companion E.,
the furry four-legged black one.
Coordinating the arms of the octopus. Switching between body, hand and text work.

http://christianebergelt.com
Photo: C. Bergelt

Susanne Keichel

studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and completed her studies as a master student under Prof. Tina Bara. Her works were exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 as part of the official supporting programme. This was followed by participation in exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Dresden, the Kunstraum Düsseldorf and the ‘Rundgang 50Hertz’ in cooperation with the National Gallery of the Berlin State Museums, the Prague Photography Festival and EMOP 2023 in Berlin, among others. Susanne Keichel was Artist in Residence at the Goethe-Institut Rotterdam and a NEUSTARTplus scholarship holder of the Kunstfonds Bonn. Since October 2023, she has been working as an artistic assistant for photography and media at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig.

Susanne Keichel’s work focuses on social and political developments and their effects over longer periods of time. A strong focus is placed on the departure and arrival of people in a globalised world and on the social inequality that our society reproduces. Susanne used the space scholarship in Libken to intensively prepare for the second part, ‘Work,’ of her three-part series
on social justice. In addition to viewing and analysing photographs on the theme of work, she read texts on class and social justice issues.

www.susannekeichel.de

Foto: Anja Schneider

Pit Heinrich

Pit Heinrich (he/him) studied literature in Freiburg and Paris. After dabbling in journalism and cultural work, he is currently studying comparative literature at the Peter Szondi Institute in Berlin. Pit leads a student seminar on literature and its theory, and also works as a reading mentor in a primary school. He is interested in the construction and deconstruction of worlds in language. This often involves questions of ecology, identity and poetic transformation. Pit’s texts have been published in various magazines in Germany and Switzerland.

In Libken, I worked on a three-part prose poem that attempts to tell a story of the relationship between humans and nature. The story spans from 1347 to the future, from the outbreak of the plague in Italy to the transformation of the Alps into a new sea. To this end, I reworked historical material into poetry and attempted to address the question: What separates us from our environment and how can we deal with this catastrophe?

Jana Krüger

was born in Aachen and grew up in East Frisia. She studied cultural studies in Potsdam and general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin. While studying literary writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, she led two projects for young refugees in independent youth welfare services. She is the winner of the 2019 Wortmeldung Förderpreis and participated in the 2022 Klagenfurt Literature Course. Her texts have been published in literary magazines such as Metamorphosen and Edit. She is currently working on her debut novel and a poetry manuscript.

During my stay in Libken, I worked on my poetry manuscript. I understand the poems as forms of nocturnal figures. The individual poems move in a fantastical and philosophical terrain that questions encounters and rebellion, sometimes straying and reinventing itself in other moments.

Foto: Hauke Vogt

Rosh Zeeba & Xenia Ende

Rosh Zeeba (they/them) works in the fields of film and video, multimedia, performance and artistic research.
In their work, Zeeba develops multidirectional narratives that negotiate Iranian queer identity, the politics of image production, the body and its associated storytelling, and deconstructed ornamentalism. Zeeba’s works always take a performative approach and question the embedding of art in established art institutions.
Her themes include intersections, glitching, irritation, intertwining, torn threads, post-cyberfeminism, queer theory, artistic research on radical image production, memory and dreams, ghosts and intergenerational trauma, Iranian mythology, and gentle world-building.
Zeeba’s works and lectures have been presented at the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, Tetem (NL), Balkan Can Kino (Athens), Leuphana University, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Fluctoplasma Festival, Favoriten Festival Dortmund, XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin, MOM Art Space, RaumLinksRechts Hamburg, KH7 Artspace (Denmark) and Grrl Haus Cinema (Berlin/Boston). As part of the para-institutional project Haus Of Xhaos, Zeeba curates FEEVA (Forum for Experimental and Emancipatory Video Art) and hosts a monthly podcast.

www.roshzeeba.com
www.hausofxhaos.com

Xenia Ende works as a transdisciplinary artist. She thinks and writes and dances and screams. Her work is about caution, playfulness, improvisation, correspondences, poetry, beauty, transfeminist-queer materialist eco-socialism, humour, twists, drag, queering and games. She calls her work ‘Neurotrans*verse Performance,’ a made-up term combining neurodiversity, transgender/transsexuality, performance, and perforation. She works in artistic and political collectives as well as in bands. She lives in the Ruhr area of Germany.

www.xeniaende.com

Photo: Rosh Zeeba

Lilli Braunisch

Lilli Braunisch (born 1985) is a sociologist working at the intersection of politics, art and urban studies, and lives in Berlin.

How is it that we perceive our reality as a manifest world and orientation? What causes the ideologies and ideas that have developed within it, and which form the basis of our interpretation of the world, to change? Or what causes them to remain unchanged? I explore these questions using the example of the concept of innovation in the German Bundestag. This is an essential question, especially for politics with its dominant influence on all areas of society: How, for example, is innovation discursively constituted as an established hype term in politics? And how is the concept enforced to such an extent that the economic maxims anchored in it are transferred to numerous areas of society? Libken has given me the space to pursue these questions further.

Foto: Richard Rocholl

Danila Lipatov

My multimedia research focuses on experiences I had at the age of 13 in a village near Leipzig, queer cultures in the GDR in the 1980s, and my new home in Friedrichshain.

The project is developing in the form of a diary. It was very inspiring for me to live in the GDR Platte and see how it is being repurposed in such a communal and open way. Through the space scholarship, I met new friends with whom we exchanged our impressions and feelings in the kitchens and on the Hollywood swing (a new word I learned in Libken).

I also had moving encounters with old stones and burial mounds, a doll’s house in the moated castle of Gerswalde and books from the cosy library in Libken, which inspired me to think and write. For example, passages from Brigitte Reimann’s diary in which she describes her trip to the Soviet Union and her infatuation with the Russian translator Nadja. Here is an excerpt from 20 July 1964: ‘We talked about a thousand things, about socialism and love and Italian shoes and Matisse, but not once about the fact that we belong to two different nations.’