Grants Worth $400 for Projects about the Movement in Africa from Goethe Institute

Goethe Institute is offering the “To whom does the earth belong?” Grant. Goethe Institute is inviting contributions which focus on the things that enable us to move – literally or figuratively – trains, roads, space programmes, aeroplanes, ports and many others – to question what it means to imagine living otherwise across borders. 

About the Project:-

• The Covid-19 pandemic has made the movement of peoples from one part of the city to another, or from one town to the next,  heavily surveilled and recorded. The pandemic has shone a spotlight on infrastructures of mobility and its shadow, fixity: passports, borders, waiting rooms, detention centres, railway lines, checkpoints, roadblocks and patrolling police or military. Shifting focus from the emphasis placed on the regulation of movement and enclosure, Goethe Institute is asking what it means, literally, culturally and politically, to engage with the materiality of movement on the African continent.

• The Project  theme includes the following questions:

  • How might we trace the afterlives of the Trans-Saharan trade routes of the 8th century to surface alternative radical imaginaries of travel and movement? 

  • How might rethinking the global Swahili worlds reframe our understandings of connections across oceans?

  •  What personal, political and cultural histories emerge via infrastructures of mobility? 

  • What do lines of flight reveal of our shared planetary futures? 

  • How are larger histories of non-alignment, anti-colonial revolt and pan Africanism inscribed into the built environment? 

  • What remains of political and cultural ideas that imagined the African continent as “the utopia of a borderless world”? 

  • How do these dreams of freedom, of other worlds that might have been possible, haunt our ability to move freely or otherwise?

Submission Specifications:-

• The submissions are contributions in the form of short texts, films, photographic essays, sound pieces or video performances that respond to the theme. 

• Goethe Institute also very much welcomes works that are a combination of the above. 

• The contributions might be new or existing works but should not be older than five years. 

• For written submissions, Goethe Institute is only interested in original, unpublished work. 

• Preference will be given to submissions from the African continent. 

Benefits:-

Selected projects that are to be exhibited (online) will receive an honorarium of R5000.

About Goethe Institute:-

Goethe Institute is the Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institute, active worldwide. It promotes the study of German abroad and encourages international cultural exchange. Goethe Institute fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on German culture, society and politics. This includes the exchange of films, music, theatre, and literature. Goethe cultural societies, reading rooms, and exam and language centers have played a role in the cultural and educational policies of Germany for more than 60 years.

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