Selection completed — the following seven projects were selected for 2025:

1. Dr. Katharina Friege & Prof. Enrico Stolzenburg: Was gibt’s da zu lachen ? / A Comic Twist on Memory? Humour in Postwar German-Language Theatre 

This project uses theatre to think critically about the postwar era in Germany and Austria in new ways. To what extent did playwrights, actors, and audiences process or suppress the consequences of Nazism and World War II in the space of theatre? More specifically, we explore the role played by humour in war-related plays from 1945 to 1961.

2. Prof. Patricia Kingori, Prof. Kathryn Eccles & Prof. Christiane Kühl & Prof. Chris Kondek: Can the fake help us identify the real?

3. Dr. Tim Middleton & Prof. Dr. Susanne Hauser & Hannah Strothmann: Building Visions: Theology and Architecture in Deep Time

4. Prof. Patrick McGuinness & Prof. Dr. Dirk Hohnsträter: Forms of Attention: Mapping the Everyday in Oxford and Berlin

The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to develop a vocabulary and a framework for examining everyday life that allows to better understand the loss of ‚normalities‘ in times of growing uncertainty. We need the everyday, and yet we do not perceive and value it until it is endangered or proactively explored by artists, social scientists and thinkers all of whom de-automatise our perception of the everyday and thereby open up possibilities to reflect on it and imagine its future form.

5. Prof. Alan Grafen & Dr. Katja Lehmann & Prof. Timothée Ingen-Housz: Dwelling across scales

The project is engaging with current issues social fragmentation by digging in the dust beneath our feet. Reflecting issues of urban soil health, we´ll encounter the „hidden half of nature“,  exploring how aesthetic practices can be interwoven with care strategies to expand the notion of dwelling across multiple scales of interactions between human and microbial worlds. A soil listening and broadcasting performance will be staged on the grounds of Teufelsberg´s historical spying station, coupled with and speculative workshop exploring the educational potential of a „soil society“.

6. Dr. Jessica Goodman & Prof. Mathilde ter Hejne: Dropping In and Out

7. Prof. Christine Gerrard & Prof. Kathryn Eccles, Prof. Michelle Christensen & Dr. Florian Conradi: Intersectional Bias in AI: Composing Cyborgs – Per/Forming Critique