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Felipe Castelblanco, Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kaensan Rattanasomrerk and Yehwan Song win the grants for 2024!

In 2024, the House for Media Art awarded six-month work grants of 12,500 euro to three artists. Nearly 400 artists from all over the world applied for the grants, which have been sponsored by the Foundation of Lower Saxony since 2001.

Many of the works developed in Oldenburg through this program have gone on to be shown in international exhibitions and won various prizes. Through its generous support, the Foundation of Lower Saxony intends to encourage the development of both artists and the House for Media Art itself, as one of the leading sites for media art in Germany. The institution is internationally known for its high-quality programming and stewarding of artistic creation, which it supports through both its international networks and local collaborations.

The jury, who reached their decision following an intense two-day discussion, consisted of Joasia Krysa, director of the Institute of Art and Technology and professor at the Liverpool John Moores University; Uli Ziemons, Co-curator of the Forum Expanded Programms of the Internationalen Filmfestspiele Berlin; and Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin, co-directors of the House for Media Art.

The open call received submissions from 430 artists, one of the largest responses in the history of the grant.  Many projects dealt with pressing issues such as the amplification of politically and historically marginalized voices, global-scale migratory movements (of both people and plants), and the consequences of climate degradation, as well as the possibilities of a different relation between humans and other plant and animal species. Others were concerned with challenging the basic technologies that play such an important role in our daily realities or with reintroducing bodily experience in a largely dematerialized digital existence.

Colombian artist Felipe Castelblanco’s research-based work investigates institutional forms, creates platforms for dialogue, and explores new forms of public space that enable coexistent encounters between unlikely audiences. The artist works with Indigenous communities, activists, and groups who share a common purpose, and facilitates collective action and creation as a way to open avenues for biocultural peace-building and historical and territorial justice. Castelblanco’s proposal revolves around the provocation that plants and humans might form an alliance to affect the course of history through selective memory loss and space travel. The project combines an essayistic elaboration on the uses of a toxic flower in Indigenous traditional practices and the story of a member of the activist group La Guardia Indigena who is transported from his homeland to the Swiss Alps. “My aim is to create an artist film based on ethnomedicinal practices of the Kamnësnta and Inga people in the Colombian Andean Amazon, who still maintain a close relation to a rare and potent plant locally known as Borrachero Andaki,” writes the artist. The jury found especially intriguing how the artist navigates the story in multiple cultural and geographical contexts, mirroring the entangled nature of complex ecosystems of vegetal beings, and human memories.

The two Thai artists Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kaensan Rattanasomrerk work with moving images and installations and share an interest in experimenting with cinematic languages. Their work often revolves around questions of collective trauma and Thailand’s history in a wider geopolitical context. Their proposal, The Spore, is a research-based, site-specific art project that explores the possibility of a future with mushrooms as potent guides.   During their Oldenburg residency, the artist duo plans to produce a new video work that follows a Thai restaurant worker searching for mushrooms in the forest, delving into the historical trauma that lingers among first-generation refugees escaping from war. The project also includes a series of mushroom sculptures, evoking the 400-year-old trade that spread different spores between Europe and Indochina.  As the artists reiterate: “The project is based on scientific research that makes us see a new paradigm of considering knowledge, wisdom, and social structure. Mushrooms can only grow from decay. Thus, they are a metaphor for how humans can reinhabit the space of the wounded as it becomes the very ground of our existence.” The jury was particularly intrigued by the poetic entanglements of organic sculptural matter and geopolitical historical investigation, in light of the duo’s experimental image-making practices.

Yehwan Song is a Korean web artist interested in creating non-user-centric, unconventional, and diverse independent internet spaces. She writes: “My primary focus in my projects is on exploring the discomfort and insecurity experienced by marginalized users, which is often hidden beneath the facade of technological utopianism, marked by excessive comfort, speed, and ease of use.” Her proposal, titled The Square, includes a website, a web performance recording, and an installation. The jury appreciated the project’s critical edge as a metaphorical exploration of digital colonization and expansionist ideology, drawing inspiration from the contemporary internet’s erosion of private spaces and putting forth aspirations for digital justice. Song’s practice destabilizes the user-friendly, shiny surface of the internet to create distance from the restraints of corporate-built online platforms and to reveal other possibilities for gathering and connecting. As she puts it: “The setup is designed to immerse the audience in a harmonized collective voice, fostering a participatory experience. The project is a call to action, urging the audience to actively shape the internet’s future.”