Past Projects

The Goethe-Institut London and Delfina Foundation offer residencies in collaboration. Their joint residency programmes have different curatorial foci on contemporary art and everyday life. 

CROWD - international dance exchange is a collaborative network of dance organisations, which seeks to support dance artists who engage with communities as part of their practice.

German writer, Kristin Höller joined a group of 14 European writers to collaborate during a creative retreat with Literature Wales in May 2025. The retreat focused on themes of ecology, the climate emergency, and community with a specific emphasis on minority languages and dialects, culminating with a presentation at Hay Festival as well as in London.
 

This residency invites two journalists from European countries to investigate, question, debate and reflect on the impact of Brexit on the British civil society.

 

With the AI Residency Programme we aim to initiate both a dialogue between art and technology and a dialogue reaching beyond the borders of European countries. The programme aims to promote artistic access to developments in the field of artificial intelligence.

Consisting of three online artist residencies, this programme generates an interdisciplinary discourse between artists and partners around the topic of Artificial Intelligence.
 

Selected artists work with the V&A’s collection exploring a particular topic in this design residency of two to six months.
 

This three-month long residency offers artists working with the moving image to investigate LUX’s collection in London and Glasgow.

 

Since its inception in 2013, the collaboration between the Goethe-Institut London and SPACE supports artists and projects who explore the critical application of emerging technologies and digitalisation. 
 

An international events and artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art.
 

The project Earth Month 2025: Cultures of Action, initiated by Goethe-Institut Glasgow, Institut Français d'Écosse, and ClimateCulture, combines a slow travel artists residency with a public programme,  fostering cultural enrichment and cross-cultural exchange on climate action and strengthening ties between France, Germany, and Scotland.

At a moment of continued uncertainty and increasing barriers, independent performance festivals from across the UK and mainland Europe come together to rip up the festival rule book by exploring what the future of producing festivals will look like. Imagining Futures aims to spark new connections, support artistic development, explore new festival models and encourage porous, international dialogue between festival leaders – through open conversations and cultural experiments!

The 2020 winter season of new films from Germany. Online for the first time, the Glasgow based festival offered a wider distribution of stories between the real and the fictional.

Talking Culture is a platform for thought-provoking discussions about the future of Europe, the UK, and the world. For episode 7, Natalie Taylor, Urban Radicals and Adam Harris talk together about their "SouthKenGreenTrail" installations, which aimed to bring greener infrastructure and more sustainability to London.

Oldies, goldies, chart hits and rare gems - we are updating our Spotify playlist every month to satisfy your curiosity and awaken some more! Singing along misheard lyrics is highly recommended!

Through online readings and talks at the intersection of scholarship with the literary scene, as well as book reviews on Instagram, the series intends to open up spaces for texts and readers, different ways of reading and new perspectives on literature. 

With Artificially correct, we are developing a tool with experts that minimises the bias in translations. We want to strengthen the position of translators and a conscious approach to translation machines and include the reality of as many people as possible in them.    

Is Artificial Intelligence advanced enough to grasp and process literary texts in all their linguistic richness, and translate them into another language? Will it ever be advanced enough? Or will it remain "artificial" instead of "artistic"? Perhaps it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful and can work as a tool to support literary translators in their work – Let's ask some experts! 

Here you will find an overview of translated publications, information on authors, translators and publishers as well as news from the German literature and book market.

Recommended books by the European Literature Network can be found in our library and in our digital library.

German is the language of love – no-one would have agreed more than Queen Victoria when she fell head over heels with the Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Learn more about the relationship between the two, and why they communicated in German.

 

The European Songbook is a collection of songs that people associate with Europe. As diverse and melodic as Europe itself are the songs and the inhabitants' views about their continent.

On the occasion of the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018, we are collecting European “heirlooms” – inventions and accomplishments created in European exchange – an tell their stories

With populism and nationalism on the rise, Fabian Saul takes to the streets of Europe in search of traces of resistance. His method of choice: Ambling
 

The debate on how Europe will move forward in these uncertain times.

In 2017, the Goethe-Institut London and the V&A have commissioned twelve international artists and designers to imagine what Europe might look like 2,000 years from now. How might our present be viewed from the future?

Europe is more than a continent or an idea. Europe consists of many different stories – personal stories of people from different generations. The project “Tell me about Europe” brings the memories of well-known Europeans alive and invites you to listen and join in the discussion.

The generation of people born around 1945, from England, France and Italy, are the ones being given a voice in our music and exchange project about the past, present, and future of Europe. The Russian-German composer Michael Langemann has created this Europe-wide musical dialogue for amateur singers and choirs, and other interested people. Voices.Europe can be experienced in both digital and analogue form, on social media and in person.

Europe Talks invites people from all over Europe to engage in cross-border debates to tackle controversial topics such as immigration, the universal basic income and climate change. The project aims to use the power of conversation to create a space for dialogue and fight polarisation. For the 2021 edition we were hosting a discussion on Post-Brexit on our Seat #12 in our library.

The interactive art installation Disappearing Wall was set up across Europe between autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Built from 6,000 wooden blocks inscribed with quotes from European high and pop culture, the walls represented the diversity of the continent. Set up in Belfast and 15 other European cities, the pan-European project travelled through overall 10 countries, celebrating the European identity with all its facets of languages and ideas.

Marxist ideas have played a role in film for more than 100 years, since Marx and his ideas are not just to be found in Germany and the world during the bicentennial year 2018. The self-test "How much Marx is in me?" provides facts for your opinion in this anniversary year.

Listen to women in leadership positions, see how they are more and more shaping arts and culture, and follow the discussion topics of this international networking format.

How do we want to live? In view of skyrocketing rents and property prices in cities worldwide, this is not so easy to answer.

Summer in Germany means barbecuing by the river, relaxing in the garden and eating ice cream. But who works while we relax?

A Europe-wide project of the Goethe-Institut asks what is our freedom based on and what endangers it.

Anti-liberal, nationalistic and populist movements are gathering momentum around the world.  Can democratic values be protected?

A joint project of several Goethe-Institutes bringing together comic artists and illustrators dealing with topics like immigration, stereotypes and prejudices about foreignness.

Two young climate activists exchange their views on different aspects of their engagement and give us an insight into their motivations and thoughts but also let us see their anger and frustration.

A workshop series taking place over three years invites twelve theatre and festival directors from across four continents to reflect on the role of theatre in a rapidly changing world. Together they will work on practices that will enable change.

In global conversations between Budapest, Cairo, Brasilia, Nairobi, Moscow, Salzburg and Zurich we debate common narratives of populists in different countries: Has the “elite” really lost contact with the “people”? What does it really mean to take people’s fears seriously? What is hidden behind the phrase “You still have to be allowed to say that”?

Do Beyoncé and Netflix feminism really liberate us? And if so, who is this “us”? Our Berlin columnist Margarita Tsomou has written a feminist manifesto in the seclusion of the lockdown. Because everything is closed outside, she takes us into her world of thoughts today

In recent years, ongoing debates about the restitution of cultural heritage objects that were stolen within various colonial contexts have gained momentum in tandem with a general awareness about the prevalence of various social injustices throughout society. While these discussions have primarily involved scholars, academics and museum professionals, artists, activists, and community members have also played an important role in reconfiguring and complicating the discourse around decoloniality, restitution, and reparations.

A research initiative by Lucy Rose Sollitt and supported by Goethe-Institut London, the Synthetic Sacred explores pathways for ecological restoration amidst hybridity. The notion of the Synthetic Sacred, is both a provocation and an attempt to forge sustainable narratives and practices. Weaving together posthuman and Indigenous knowledge systems, it explores the sacred as a means to heal fractured relations with nature and resist capitalist-colonialist extraction. It proposes the sacred as a framework to guide and detoxify our synthetic creations. In this way, the Synthetic Sacred aims to shift the compass of development away from extraction and exploitation of life and towards restoration, kinship and flourishing.

How are new technologies such as robotics impacting our educational and cultural experiences in the UK and beyond? And how does culture impact how we adopt new technologies into our everyday lives? 

How can cultural heritage be preserved digitally? With #Heritage_digitised we delve into discourses surrounding the digitisation of art and cultural heritage to ask what does this imply for narratives around postcolonialism, sustainability, representation and diversity? 

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 – and in doing so revolutionised architecture, design and the way we think about it. What influence does this art school have today?

Privacy and data ownership in the digital age.

The project is an interdisciplinary research in the region of North-West Europe. Through hackathons, artistic research and a concluding symposium it explores the questions of how weather and climate change are experienced and how we communicate about them.

The Kultursymposium Weimar is a festival for new networks and ideas. Every two years, the Goethe-Institut invites over five hundred people from all over the world to come together in Weimar to attend the event. 

Ebooks, smartphone apps and online reading platforms: The digital publishing world is vibrant and colourful, but remains a niche.

Many people would like to emerge from the pandemic with a different attitude to nature - one that values repair and protection, and addresses global exploitation and destruction. We have launched a series of artworks and collaborations on this topic. 

The theme of the DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes was remarkably relevant to the times we are living: a pandemic prompting us to work with each other differently, calls for a fairer society, art spaces looking for new strategies to remain relevant and the hysterical (or just baffled?) media interest for crypto art. The topic also inserts itself into a broader, much older context in which contemporary art follows market logics that don’t work for most artists.

So far, blockchain systems have been mostly used in the world of finance or supply chain but they have so much more potential. An article about the Berlin contribution to the DAOWO Sessions - Artworld Prototypes: Black Swan DAO.

With the support of 18 Goethe-Institutes across Europe, this bi-monthly workshop series covered the fields of Visual Arts, Music, Narratives, and Handicrafts, highlighting technologies such asAI, Web3 & Blockchain, Immersive Technologies, Machine Learning, Digital Fabrication, Generative Art, Creative Coding, and more. With workshops primarily online, alongside select hybrid sessions, participants gain hands-on experience, engage in critical discussions, and connect with a diverse European community.
 

'Studio Quantum' is a new international artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art. The residency and accompanying event series will examine important ethical and ecological questions around the impact of quantum technologies. 

DAOWO: Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others - The global collaboration project examines the potential of blockchain technologies for the arts and civil society. By convening transnational networks of leading international arts and tech institutions and communities, we seek to seed a new decentralised ecology of open source cultural organisations, built by artists embedded in distributed global communities. An initiative of Furtherfield, Serpentine Galleries and the Goethe-Institut London.