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State capital Stuttgart

Cultural awards and scholarships

Hannsmann-Poethen Literature Scholarship

The Hannsmann-Poethen literary scholarship is a unique tandem scholarship in Germany. The state capital Stuttgart awards it to an author and an artist from another field who jointly realize a literary-artistic project in Stuttgart.

The Tandem Fellowship, unique in Germany, was initiated by the author couple Margarete Hannsmann and Johannes Poethen.

The scholarship

The Hannsmann-Poethen Literary Fellowship of the City of Stuttgart is awarded every two years. The interdisciplinary fellowship breaks genre boundaries and brings literature together with other art forms (art, music, theater, film, new media, etc.). This cross-disciplinary collaboration is intended to further enliven not only the literary scene, but the entire cultural scene, and open it to new, unfamiliar experiences.

The fellowship comprises a total of 15,000 euros and provides the fellows each with their own living and working studio during their three-month stay in Stuttgart, as well as a project budget of a maximum of 9,000 euros.

The idea of the fellowship was inspired by the author couple Margarete Hannsmann and Johannes Poethen, who lived and worked together in Stuttgart. Their keen interest in other art forms, such as music and visual art, found its way into their work, which critically examines political developments and the zeitgeist.

Impressions from the last few years

The project "Macho Sounds / Gender Noise" by Sofia Dona and Daphne Dragona at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2020).
How do the sounds of cars influence constructions and perceptions of gender? Will the voice of the car of the future be female and what does that mean? "Macho Sounds / Gender Noise" approached the car as an example of a powerful machine and a patriarchal technology. It examined its manifestations in the past and its projections into the future.
Human imitations of car engines, voices of virtual assistants, machine-written texts and kinetic sculptures came together in the exhibition to form an individual installation that reveals and discusses the gendering of the car on a symbolic and material level. The project "Macho Sounds/Gender Noise" was presented as part of the festival DIE IRRITIERTE STADT at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.
Video installation "Big Ä, Ö and Ü suddenly gone!" and micro-reading by Hannsmann-Pothen Fellows Lara Hampe and Vera Sebert 2018, at the Stuttgart Public Library.
Based on sketches for various computer programs and theoretical research, the two fellows posed the question of their own sovereignty in the context of digital technology. What is behind the fashionable concept of the algorithm, which is used as a projection screen for a wide variety of social visions of fear and the future? Manifested boundaries between literature, visual art, and technology were consciously questioned and transgressed in order to create spaces for new strategies of perception.
"More space is created here": language in public space - a project by Lara Hampe and Vera Sebert during their residency at the Stuttgart Writers' House 2018.
On the opening night of the ECLAT 2017 festival, the cross-genre performance "DIY or DIE" and the live radio play "FRIENDLY FIRE" by composer Jagoda Szmytka and author Gerhild Steinbuch premiered.
In a spectacular vaudeville revue, Jagoda Szmytka showed the longings and abysses associated with infinite freedom and boundlessness. Gerhild Steinbuch then sent a performer in "FRIENDLY FIRE" on a search for possibilities of understanding the (women's) body differently from submission.
Steinbuch and Szmytka's themes are highly topical and revolve around self-optimization and staging, contemporary violence and its language systems, creativity hype, the crossing of boundaries, the dissolution of privacy, and the great influence of digital media on people.
Cultural Office

Neda Pouryekta

Symbol image person contact
Subject specialist literature and philosophy

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Explanations and information

Picture credits

  • Matter Of / City of Stuttgart
  • Matthias Fritsch
  • Matthias Fritsch
  • Matthias Fritsch
  • Frank Kleinbach
  • Frank Kleinbach
  • Lara Hampe
  • Martin Sigmund
  • Martin Sigmund
  • Martin Sigmund
  • Peter Palec, Discodöner/Stuttgart City Library
  • LHS Stuttgart - Photographer Phi Dang
  • Matter Of