OPEN CALL ZK/U 2026
ZK/U is an artist-led independent art residency and project space. It hosts a multidisciplinary residency program, offering a living and working space for practitioners of all kinds (artists, researchers, activists, professionals of various fields). The residency program encourages proposals that challenge conventions, take daring positions, and include original and extraordinary perspectives. It welcomes applications with a project proposal framed as
- a conceptual, contextual and interventionist contemporary artistic position,
- research or experimentation in the fields of urbanism, geography, anthropology, architecture and the humanities.
The ZK/U residency program allows mutual learning, spontaneous collaborations, discussions and exchanges to emerge, enriched by the diversity of disciplines and profiles of the residents. The ZK/U building, a former train station building located in a dynamic public park, is a space for urban experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaborations. ZK/U’s cultural venues host regular public events for diverse audiences. Residents are encouraged to participate in ZK/U’s cultural program.
Conceptual framework
In the form of Narratives, ZK/U sets core themes to define the conceptual framework of its program. The ZK/U program is designed to include space for participation by ZK/U residents, should timing and project developments allow. Therefore, applicants to this open call are encouraged (but not restricted!) to formulate their project proposals with the four narratives in mind, as a possibility to connect their work to ZK/U. In the application process described below, applicants will be able to share if their proposal refers to one, more or none of the narratives. They are currently described as follows:
Planetary Agencies – Reimagining Coexistence in the Anthropocene
A city is inhabited by more lives and forces than its human plans can account for. Planetary Agencies turns towards the plants, waterways, microorganisms and material systems that shape urban existence. Through artistic practices of listening, sensing and representation, it asks how these relationships might enter collective decisions. Who speaks for a river, and what does that act of representation make visible or leave out? The narrative approaches coexistence as a contested practice, shaped by ecological dependencies, histories of extraction and unequal responsibility. It invites ways of perceiving and inhabiting shared environments that unsettle familiar hierarchies between humans and the worlds around them.
Speculative Futures – Imagining a World Beyond the AI Paradigm
Between technological promise and everyday reality, competing visions of the future are taking shape. Speculative Futures brings artistic imagination into the politics of AI, asking who produces these visions, whose knowledge sustains them, and which possibilities remain out of view. Fiction, artistic experiments and imagined everyday situations become ways to explore changing relationships between labour, authorship and power. What might creativity, ownership or collective life look like under different technological conditions? Moving between the unsettling, the ordinary and the unexpectedly hopeful, the narrative treats imagined futures as tools for examining the present—and for opening up decisions about how we want to live.
The Politics of Food – Community, Metabolic States and Biotic Cities
A meal carries histories that reach far beyond the table. The Politics of Food moves between kitchen, soil and supply chain, approaching food as an artistic medium through which questions of migration, labour and land ownership can be explored. Gathering, fermenting, cooking and sharing make these relationships tangible, while asking how nourishment, knowledge and resources are distributed. At ZK/U, formats such as Food & Footage connect culinary practice with moving images, opening the shared table as a space of exchange and disagreement. The narrative asks what becomes possible when the work of feeding a city is approached as a cultural and political practice.
Relational Urbanism – From Segregation to the Interweaving of Urban Spaces
The city takes shape in its thresholds: a doorway opening onto the street, a courtyard shared by neighbours, a workplace becoming a gathering space after hours. Relational Urbanism turns to these points of contact to ask how space choreographs encounters, regulates access and accommodates change. Through artistic interventions and spatial experiments, it explores how different uses and rhythms coexist, and where their claims collide. Openness itself becomes a question: when does removing a boundary enable participation, and when does it undermine privacy or protection? Here, urban transformation begins with close attention to the everyday arrangements through which people share, claim and negotiate space.
ZK/U residency program
- a studio space for working and living
- access to communal spaces (kitchen, residency terrace, rooftop, library)
- a residency program of weekly dinners, studio visits, exhibition tours and bi-monthly open studio events (OPENHAUS)
- promotion of the residency fellows’ work online and locally
- support to locate events, resources, and urban discourses relevant to the residency fellows’ research interests
- possibility to take part or be part of ZK/U’s public events
- possibility to propose self-initiated public events, workshops or other formats
A note on AI and your application
We recognise that generative AI has become part of many people’s working processes, and we do not discourage its use in preparing an application. We know that artists write many applications, often in languages other than their own, and that tools for translation, editing, structuring or drafting can make this work considerably easier. We simply ask you to be transparent about how AI has been involved in your application. Its use will not in itself positively or negatively affect our assessment.
At the same time, we are genuinely interested in hearing your voice. Generative AI can be very good at producing fluent language; it is not necessarily as good at producing the particularities, frictions, humour, contradictions and unexpected turns through which a person becomes present in a text. So, however you use these tools, we encourage you to make the final application recognisably your own.
Participation fee
With our general open call, we do not offer funded residencies; rather, we ask our applicants to self-organise funding for their proposed residency project to join. After a successful application, you will have a two-year timeframe to join the residency. We support application processes with official invitation letters. Funded residencies are published through separate calls on an irregular basis.
Depending on the type of studio and the length of stay (2-6 months), the residency fees are between 750 € and 1200 € per month. The fees cover all utility costs, space usage and participation in the residency program. The residency period can take place within the next two years after the selected resident is notified. Additional costs apply when more than one person lives in the studio.
This year we are also accepting applications by artist duos or families to join us in the collective studio; it has three separate rooms, an individual kitchen and an individual bathroom.
Our Policy of Respect
ZK/U is a space of encounter and dialogue where participants and collaborators meet and work together to realise common creative aims and exchange. During their stay, residents will share communal spaces and participate in our program with other practitioners from different localities and perspectives than their own. Good relations at ZK/U depend on solidarity, mutual respect and trust. We acknowledge the diverse knowledge, experiences, and aspirations people bring to ZK/U and commit ourselves to actively confronting and countering all forms of discrimination, in an ongoing process of learning and unlearning. All participants of ZK/U commit themselves to our Policy of Respect at the beginning of their stay or collaboration. Please inform yourself about our Policy of Respect here.
How to apply
To join our residency program, please fill out our application form below. Please share short descriptions of your proposal, your practice and your biography, and inform us if your proposal relates to one or more of our narratives. The option of submitting a proposal unrelated to one of our narratives is possible. Within the application form, we will also ask you to upload the following files:
1) in one PDF: Your CV and a short portfolio with a selection of 3 – 5 relevant past projects, including short project descriptions (max. 8 pages/10 mb)
2) in one PDF: Your project proposal. You are welcome to structure it as you like. We suggest considering: a project description, a working plan, personal relation to the project themes. How does it relate to ZK/U or the city of Berlin? (max. 2 pages)
