The Neues Volkshaus Cotta and the Künstlerbund Dresden invite visual artists and collectives to a two-week residency in western Dresden.
The residency is aimed at artistic practices that are situated within social contexts and engage in dialogue with neighborhoods, places, urban spaces, and their participants.
The central question is:
How can artistic practice engage with a neighborhood, its people, stories, conflicts, and everyday knowledge?
The program views art not exclusively as the production of works, but as a process of perception, encounter, and collaborative development. We are seeking approaches that are open to exchange, collective processes, and new forms of knowledge.
We are particularly interested in how artistic work can help shape social spaces, make them visible, or reexamine them.
Click here for the call for proposals as a PDF
The residency takes place at the Neues Volkshaus Cotta —a cultural and community center currently under construction in western Dresden with a 100-year history rooted in both labor and culture.
The Cotta district and the surrounding neighborhoods of Löbtau and Gorbitz not only form the spatial framework of the program but also serve as its starting point.
Western Dresden is characterized by diverse realities of life, neighborhoods, and local initiatives. At the same time, there are currently few places where contemporary visual art is visible and accessible in everyday life.
The residency aims to open up an experimental space for this purpose: for artistic practice, exchange, and public processes.
Here is a brief analysis of the social context.
Access to the building is barrier-free. However, entrances and paths within the grounds and garden involve navigating differences in elevation.
Socio-spatial practice describes artistic approaches that engage with specific places and their social conditions.
It emerges through dialogue with people, situations, and local forms of knowledge, and explores how relationships between art, everyday life, and the public sphere can develop.
This can involve neighborhoods, infrastructure, memories, conflicts, care, participation, or forms of collective action.
We are interested in processes that do not operate above a place, but rather with it.
Artistic practices may include: oral history, staging, environmental art, happenings, and performative, participatory, collective, and transdisciplinary approaches—ranging from artistic interventions to food art.
For a period of two weeks, an artist or collective will have the opportunity to work on-site at the Neues Volkshaus Cotta and temporarily use the space as an open production and meeting place. We view the two-week residency as a period of research into the place and its people. It can be structured individually in weekly blocks during the program period. Access to the building is flexible and available 24/7.
The following facilities are available:
The following are available for temporary use, among other things:
The workshops can be set up on-site on a mobile basis and are intended as a shared resource for experimental and collective modes of production. However, it is not a requirement to use or integrate the workshop resources on-site.
The residency is explicitly not intended to be a closed production space.
During the working phase, the artistic process is intended to be accessible in various forms: e.g., through open hours, discussions, encounters, or situational formats.
The neighborhood is not viewed as an audience in the traditional sense, but rather as a potential space for the work to resonate.
We are seeking approaches that are open to engaging with this open-ended process.
We invite visual artists and collectives
The fellowship aims to open up new spaces for the visual arts in western Dresden and, in the long term, to strengthen connections between art, the neighborhood, and sociocultural structures.
It is conceived as an experimental framework for an artistic practice that does not seek public engagement only at the point of presentation, but rather allows it to emerge already within the creative process.
As a result of the two-week residency at the Neues Volkshaus Cotta, we hope to organize a public presentation.
By “presentation,” we mean, for example, an artist talk, a performance, a presentation on the creative process, a session, a matinee, etc., with public participation.
Application period: through August 10, 2026
Note: We deliberately do not require the submission of a finished concept, as we are seeking a site-specific exploration and development—which is what the residency is all about. For the application, we are therefore interested in your artistic practice and personal motivation—what appeals to you about the location and the project, and what your initial thoughts and ideas might be—in other words, a sketch.
Selection: Selection will be made by a jury consisting of representatives from the Neues Volkshaus Cotta and the Künstlerbund Dresden. The jury will meet on August 26, after which acceptance or rejection will be communicated.
Duration: Starting in September 2026. The residency is to take place over a period of two weeks. These two weeks may be taken consecutively. It is also possible to split the weeks into blocks, but individual days cannot be selected separately.
End: with the presentation in October 2026
Fee for Residence: 1,200
Presentation fee: 300
Material costs: 700
Transportation costs: 110
Travel expenses: Deutschlandticket
In that case, please feel free to contact esf@neuesvolkshaus.de.
