Mensch Maschine Residency Programme 2025
E-WERK Luckenwalde, JUNGE AKADEMIE Akademie der Künste, Berlin and E.ON Foundation are pleased to announce artists, Assem Hendawi, hn. lyonga in collaboration with Safiya Yon, Emerson Culurgioni in collaboration with Viktor Brim and Kira Xonorika have been successfully awarded fellowships for the Mensch-Maschine residency programme 2025, from over 350 international applications.
The Mensch-Maschine programme funds international (emerging) artists, who work with, or address ideas surrounding digital technologies, the anthropocene, and/or Artificial Intelligence in the broadest sense; who seek to challenge the Western story of ‘progress’ and problematic dualisms of “natural” and “artificial” and offer new ideas of patterns, narrations and approaches to a world with machines and who explore urgent aspects of today’s societies and the planet and transform their research into aesthetically compelling forms.
The jury for the fellowships included Anh-Linh Ngo (Vice President, Akademie der Künste, Architecture Theorist and Curator); Tiara Roxanne, Artist and Cultural Theorist; Pia-Marie Remmers, Assistant Curator, Haus am Waldsee; Sinthujan Varatharajah, Political Geographer and Laura Helena Wurth, art critic and author.
Katharina Worf commented, “It was our pleasure to explore over 350 visionary proposals from interdisciplinary artists and thinkers around the globe and to choose these exceptional artists to join us in 2025. Witnessing the tenderness with which they navigated pressing topics such as ecology, economics, philosophy, and future ethical life was deeply inspiring. We are honored to foster a residency space that embraces inclusivity while integrating Indigenous ecological perspectives. Together, we aim to cultivate a nurturing environment for artists in Luckenwalde and Berlin—one that supports their careers, fosters creative growth, and sparks meaningful dialogue within our community and beyond."
Mensch-Maschine residents:
Safiya Yon is a social practice artist & community mental health counselor. In layering narrative therapy, artistic research, ancestral remembrance, and collective care interventions, she offers space for transforming (neo-)colonial pain and fertilizing ground for Afrofuturist imagination. Yon has held community care interventions at various institutions such as Folkwang Universität der Künste, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; Schauspielhaus Dortmund; etc. In 2024 she curated the exhibition Rituals of Regulation at Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal and is currently a scholar at Filmhaus Köln and Akademie der Künste der Welt’s NEW CURATORS program.
hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator. I live and work in Berlin. I have lived in other places - and they are still present in my body, my writings, and in my life in the diaspora. I have not arrived here on my own. I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling as a vital way of neighboring, and engaging migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities. hn. lyonga is currently the co-coordinator of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling
During the Mensch-Maschine Fellowship, the pair will reflect on the Indigenous African technology of Lukasa memory boards, containing a capsule archive of knowledge and histories of the Luba people. They aim to expand this technology into a sacred ancestral trans-digital archive, recording traces of Black and Indigenous life and survival strategies. Orbiting through digital solar systems and cosmic time zones, the ancestral memory disk encrypted with data written in ancestral algorithmic code will become an open and ongoing knowledge portal to be passed onto future generations existing light years from today.
They said, “We are thrilled to have been awarded a Mensch Maschine Fellowship for 2024/2025. This residency allows us the opportunity to move beyond Western colonial perspectives on technology and to emphasize Indigenous knowledge systems. We aim to create cartographies that articulate our identities and movements, memorializing the stories and experiences that have shaped us while reflecting on our collective pasts, presents, and futures”
Viktor Brim is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores the ontologies of cinematic spaces, urban phenomena and the concept of power. His work focuses on the physical manifestation of power structures and their spatial and territorial extension. He combines documentary, research and analytical approaches with the sensual, aesthetic and tangible quality of the moving image and installation elements. He is particularly interested in tracing concrete discourses and ideologies that become visible in material forms.
Emerson Culurgioni is a media artist and filmmaker whose work explores the interactions between industrial structures, spatial change and socio-economic power relations. His focus is on how visible and invisible influences transform physical, digital and social spaces. He combines documentary and essayistic approaches to investigate aesthetic and structural entanglements of power and resource control. His films LEUNA, HABITAT, LA DUNA and AUSBEUTUNG have been shown in exhibitions and at international festivals. They will create a new installation, using documentary material, 3D simulations and 3D printed objects.
Kira Xonorika (1995, they/them) is an artist, author, and futurist whose work explores technoscience, sovereignty, temporality, world-building, ecology, and magic. Their awards, residencies and fellowships include Hyundai Artlab, Dreaming Beyond AI, Momus, Eyebeam, Salzburg Global Seminar, and Ars Electronica. Their writing has been published by e-flux, C magazine, and Cambridge University. Exhibitions include the Ford Foundation Gallery, arebyte, and Honor Fraser Gallery, the Roy and Edna Disney CALARTS theatre. They are also the founder and curator of South America’s first residency exploring AI, the "Future Memory Lab." During the residency, Xonorika will expand on the film Deep Time Dance, which explores macrocosmic connections, speculative terraformation, and dance. The film generates worldbuilding informed by Guaraní cosmology and Two-Spirit Indigenous Futurism, centering on joy, pleasure, and movement. The artist will also create a sculpture in dialogue with the film. These works explore the potential of AI to cultivate ancestral intuition as a form of re-Indigenization, revitalizing worlds, somatic knowledge systems, and, in turn, regenerating symbolic memory, spirituality, and techno-science.
Assem Hendawi (b. 1989) is an artist who mainly works with still and moving images as well as text. With a conceptual approach, Hendawi uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. His works create fictional and experiential universes that only emerge bit by bit. By investigating language self-referentially, he creates intense personal moments with rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, which lure the viewer round and round in circles. The resulting works are deconstructed to the extent that meanings shift and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, he focuses on the ideas of “public space” and spaces that could be or spaces to come: the non-private space, the virtual owned space, space that is accessible by imagination. His works are often about contact with architecture and systems. Space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd and abstract ways. He currently lives and works in Egypt.
He said, "The Mensch-Maschine Fellowship provides the essential space for my research and questions to grow and evolve. It allows me to ruminate on and organically develop a new work - Fables and Forecast - as I navigate complex contexts of futurity and power. This fellowship offers precisely the environment this project needs to reach its full depth."
