Schloss Solitude Akademie: The Future of Artist Residencies Could Be Online

Research notes from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2014.

In one of my strokes of luck (proverbial, almost as much as my gaffes) I was invited to a spot north of Stuttgart — in the middle of nowhere — in an eighteenth-century castle surrounded by a lush forest populated by wild boar.

An institution out of time

The castle (Schloss) Solitude is home to one of Europe’s most prestigious artistic institutions: the Schloss Solitude Akademie, which hosts 45 artists and researchers from different disciplines every year, from visual arts to performance, from journalism to business. The categories are many and constantly evolving — ensuring continuous renewal and fresh perspectives.

For instance, among the current residents in the “business” section there is a hacker working on the concept of intellectual property.

The selected artists are required to do nothing other than reside here for a year and develop their own project, in whatever time and manner they prefer. They have a studio to work in, a set of workshops (woodworking, metalworking, music, performing arts) and a library full of books I wish I owned. Each Fellow can request new books: in this way the library evolves following the desires and needs of the artists.

On one of the library’s display cases, one of the artists had these lines inscribed:

Challenge the increasing saturation of printed matter

What do you plan to do with this when you’re done with it?

(The first response to this question is a scanner-bookdrive with which Schloss Solitude Akademie is planning to digitise the library.)

Community and relationships

The 45 fellows devote almost a year of their lives to producing something, discussing with others, studying, and presenting their work. In the evenings they come together and build relationships that will last a lifetime.

The academy’s website does excellent work in visualising all the connections created within this network, which, after thirty years of activity, counts approximately one thousand people.

Jean-Baptiste Joly, director of the academy for nearly thirty years, says: “What we do is create a community, based on the individual personalities we add to the group. It’s much easier when we involve individual artists than when it involves groups.”

This is the first year (2014) in which the academy has accepted online applications: it received more than 3,000, from around the world — double the figure from the previous year. The applications will undergo a selection process by a panel of jurors (typically, figures of the highest standing in the relevant disciplines).

Towards an academy without geographical borders

Even before examining its online evolution, the academy is looking concretely toward Asia: they have decided to abandon the Eurocentric worldview and have composed the next jury almost entirely of jurors from India, China, and Hong Kong. The next jury president will be the Indian architect Kaiwan Mehta. The selection of jurors allows the academy to orient its sensibility toward new geographical areas and new subjects.

What I perceived here is a genuinely extraordinary creative energy and power. Schloss Solitude Akademie has managed to evolve continuously and to produce successful artists for a very long time — tracking the changing parameters of success over time.

The digital challenge

Today artistic production is decreasingly tied to residency in a physical space and to individual creation: it often happens collectively and in an unstructured fashion, via the web as well. We might compare artistic creation to content production: the challenges being confronted are the same.

Debate, too, is now mediated by the web: it becomes broader, less structured, harder to follow, and often more acrimonious. Meanwhile, the online creative community is of fantastical proportions compared to the offline one: consider MOOCs, which can aggregate 30,000 enrollees and lend themselves to new and very different forms of interaction from those we are accustomed to.

The academy must find a way to radically transform its activities while maintaining the high quality standards it has upheld so far, and improving documentation of its work. The digital switch is considered part of the activities that the German Ministry of Culture includes in a programme it has named, clearly and somewhat ominously, “digital offensive.”

These are some of the questions I found myself discussing with the academy director (Jean-Baptiste Joly), with Stefano, with Clara and Angela from the Akademie, and with a pair of consultants from Berlin (Igor and Johannes, Third Wave):

Does it make sense to create online fellowships?
Is it possible to activate and condense online debate in a way that is genuinely productive?
How can synergies between online and offline be activated?
How can the challenge of an international and deeply multicultural audience be met?

The discussion remains open.

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