OPEN CALL ZK/U 2026

Overview

ZK/U (Center for Art and Urbanistics) is an artist-led independent art residency and project space in Berlin. It hosts a multidisciplinary residency program, offering a living and working space for practitioners of all kinds including artists, researchers, activists, and professionals. The program encourages proposals that challenge conventions, take daring positions, and include original and extraordinary perspectives, with a focus on conceptual, contextual, and interventionist contemporary artistic positions, research, or experimentation in urbanism, geography, anthropology, architecture, and the humanities. The residency fosters mutual learning, spontaneous collaborations, discussions, and exchanges, enriched by the diversity of disciplines and profiles of its residents. ZK/U's building, a former train station located in a dynamic public park, serves as a space for urban experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Conceptual Framework: ZK/U Narratives

ZK/U defines core themes as 'Narratives' to frame its program. Applicants are encouraged (but not restricted) to formulate project proposals considering these narratives to connect their work to ZK/U. During the application process, applicants can indicate if their proposal refers to one, more, or none of these narratives.

The Narratives

• Planetary Agencies – Reimagining Coexistence in the Anthropocene: Focuses on non-human lives and forces in the city, exploring relationships between ecological dependencies, histories of extraction, and unequal responsibility through artistic practices of listening, sensing, and representation.
• Speculative Futures – Imagining a World Beyond the AI Paradigm: Explores the politics of AI through artistic imagination, questioning who produces visions of the future, whose knowledge sustains them, and the impact on labor, authorship, and collective life.
• The Politics of Food – Community, Metabolic States and Biotic Cities: Approaches food as an artistic medium to explore migration, labor, and land ownership, focusing on how nourishment, knowledge, and resources are distributed.
• Relational Urbanism – From Segregation to the Interweaving of Urban Spaces: Examines how urban thresholds and points of contact choreograph encounters, regulate access, and accommodate change through artistic interventions and spatial experiments.

Residency Program Benefits

• 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 in or be part of ZK/U's public events
• Possibility to propose self-initiated public events, workshops, or other formats

Note on AI in Applications

ZK/U recognizes and does not discourage the use of generative AI in preparing applications, especially for translation, editing, structuring, or drafting. Applicants are simply asked to be transparent about AI involvement; its use will not positively or negatively affect the application.