rashomotion
S_olar
E_clipse
A_rtists
R_esidency
SEAR 2026 brings artists, scientists, and regional participants together in Upper Lusatia for two weeks of collective research, production, and exchange around the partial solar eclipse on 12 August 2026.
Based at Kulturfabrik Schönbach — a former weaving mill set among Umgebinde houses, forests, and hills — we develop films, sound pieces, performances, mappings, and installations that connect astrophysics, Sorbian cosmologies, and regional histories with contemporary artistic practice.
The residency is shaped by its specific context: nearby forests and post-mining landscapes, and emerging scientific infrastructures such as the planned Einstein Telescope and the Low Seismic Lab in the Lusatian granite. The region is not a backdrop — it actively informs the work.
2 - 16 AUG 2026
@ SCHÖNBACH
At the core are six to eight multidisciplinary groups. Each brings together artists working in time-based media, scientists, and people rooted in the region — including Sorbian voices, permaculture practitioners, and participants from the Lebenshilfe workshop, who take part as questioners and co-producers, not as subjects.
Together, the groups develop precise questions where scientific perspectives, artistic methods, and regional experience meet — and turn them into concrete work: films, multichannel installations, audio pieces, performances, and cartographic and digital experiments.
The residency moves in three phases: online research labs and the forming of groups; fieldwork across Upper and Lower Lusatia, with the Cinebus as a mobile time-based-media studio; and a structured Eclipse Field Day on 12 August, leading into post-production and first presentations.
HOW
WE
WORK
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Four interlocking focuses — Science × Arts, Sorbian and regional cosmologies, inclusive formats, and international co-productions — open onto a set of connected lines:
Holes, horizons, thresholds — from black holes, gravitational waves, and the curvature of spacetime to the physical traces of lignite mining in Lusatia.
Cycles and time structures — the eclipse read alongside Saros cycles, archaeological traces, and Sorbian lore.
Language, mapping, data — Sorbian place- and star-names, historical maps, and scientific models read together, reframing Lusatia as a skyscape.
From loom to algorithm — the region's textile history as an early link between material, structure, and computational thinking.
Ghosts in the Machines — the moments when measurement, simulation, or algorithms begin to produce unexpected images and sounds.
These are not separate categories but movements — projects can cross between them and make new connections.
We don't prescribe outcomes. Across the groups, the work tends to take shape as essay and experimental film, multichannel sound and listening pieces, performances and somatic practices, speculative cartographies, and immersive or data-driven installations.
Some projects turn measurement and noise — gravitational-wave data, seismic readings, simulations — into image and sound. Others read the landscape itself: post-mining ground, Sorbian toponyms, the textile past, the eclipse as a figure for memory, transformation, and recurrence.
Many move between the two. What they share is a way of working that treats research and region not as material to illustrate, but as something to think and make with.
WHAT EMER
GES
PROGRAM
Pre-phase · starting July
The work begins online. In two rounds of video calls per group, participants meet, look at their shared theme, and gather first associations — where measurement data, Sorbian narratives, film, sound, or performance might connect. Groups arrive in Schönbach with a common focus and first hypotheses already in hand.
Week 1
2 – 8 August — arrival, research, first production
The first days are for arriving, onboarding, and forming groups: presenting practices, sharpening questions, and setting the axes each project will follow. An inclusive morning with Lebenshilfe introduces formats and first settings for interviews and conversations. Mid-week, the residency moves outward — an excursion across Upper Lusatia to Bieleboh and Czorneboh, into the landscape and its stories, then into the post-mining country, permaculture sites, and Senckenberg in Lower Lusatia. First recordings, sound tests, and sketches begin to take shape, and each group works toward a short project outline: a working title and thesis, the people and roles involved, the media and formats in view, the relevant places and partners.
Scientific guests
The groups work alongside researchers connected to Lusatia and its emerging research landscape:
Dr. Konstancja Satalecka (DZA)
multi-messenger astrophysicist working at the meeting point of gamma rays and neutrinos.
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Dr. Mike Lindner (DZA)
geophysicist working on seismology, measurement, and the conditions of seismic quiet.
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Prof. Torsten Ensslin (MPA Garching)
astrophysicist working on information field theory, cosmology, and artificial and other intelligence.
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Dr. Stefan Ohm (DZA)
astrophysicist and science enabler in the build-up of the German Centre for Astrophysics in Görlitz.
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Dr. Jiří Vyskočil (Ex-CASUS)
physicist and specialist in high-performance computing, simulation, and scientific visualisation.
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Dr. Eduardo Colombo (CASUS)
ecosystem researcher working on how local interactions shape the spatial organisation of species.
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Dr. Nona Schulte-Römer
researcher on light, night, and urban transformation.
…in collaboration with further researchers from DZA, CASUS, and Senckenberg, with more to be confirmed.
Week 2
9 – 16 August — fieldwork, production, eclipse
The second week shifts fully into making. With the Cinebus as a mobile time-based-media studio moving between field and lab, groups shoot, record, map, and cut: reviewing material, laying down rough edits and sound layouts, testing multichannel setups and experimental presentation forms. In selected projects, participants from Lebenshilfe take active roles — as questioners, interlocutors, voices, or moderating figures. The week is paced toward 12 August, when the partial eclipse becomes both a shared event and a source of material and experience that feeds the final stretch of work.
12 August · Eclipse Field Day
The public culmination of the residency —
a day-long, site-specific field day that carries the work out into the landscape (see TSHBE below).
After · Autumn & Winter 2026
Once the eclipse phase is over, the focus turns to finishing, reflection, and putting the work into the world: editing, sound design, and colour are completed, multichannel installations and performative formats are tested, and the groups exchange strategies for presentation and distribution. Depending on resources, parts of the post-production may continue in exchange with international partners such as the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation in Sokołowsko (PL). First public presentations follow across Lusatia and beyond — at the Fokus Festival in Görlitz, the Weltspiegel Finsterwalde, the Werkhofgarten Kleinkrausnik, and other partner venues — shown alongside the scientists and communities involved, and carried onward into further festivals, exhibitions, and science-art contexts.
•••
TSHBE! —
The Sun Has Been Eaten!
A public sound art day for the solar eclipse · 12 August 2026 · free admission
The title traces back to one of the oldest descriptions of an eclipse — on Chinese oracle bones from the 12th century BC it simply read "the sun is being eaten." On the day of the eclipse, the residency turns outward into a day-long, site-specific field day: a continuous dramaturgy of sound, movement, seismics, and topography that follows the landscape from a flooded quarry up to the summit of Bieleboh — the mountain of the "White God" — and into the night.
Part observation, part ritual, part live experiment — not a cultural programme staged around the eclipse, but
an attempt to meet a real cosmic event with real means: sound, voice, rhythm, silence. Developed within SEAR, in collaboration with DZA and CASUS, with Sorbian voices, and with participants from Lebenshilfe Zittau.
All public and free. Dress code: red. Full programme and line-up to follow.
DONORS
We’d like to express our sincere thanks to our supporters and sponsors. Their commitment is essential to making our projects possible
Das Vorhaben wird gefördert durch die Stiftung für das sorbische Volk, die jährlich auf der Grundlage der beschlossenen Haushalte des Deutschen Bundestages, des Landtages Brandenburg und des Sächsischen Landtages Zuwendungen aus Steuermitteln erhält.
Projekt spěchuje so wot Załožby za serbski lud, kotraž dóstawa lětnje přiražki z dawkowychsrědkow na zakładźe hospodarskich planow, wobzamknjenych wot Zwjazkoweho sejma, Krajneho sejma Braniborskeje a Sakskeho krajneho sejma.
Projekt spěchujo se wót Załožby za serbski lud, kótaraž dostawa lětnje pódpěru z dankowychsrědkow na zakłaźe etatow, wobzamknjonych wót Zwězkowego sejma, Krajnego sejmaBramborska a Sakskego krajnego sejma.
PARTNER
Our heartfelt thanks go to our partner, whose shared vision and aid
help us create spaces for imagination, dialogue, and film.
SEAR
is part of a growing network of independent residencies,
research labs, and community-based initiatives working across art, science, and regional contexts.
Together with partners such as FSO Poland & FSO France and other international collaborators, we are building connections that extend beyond a single residency format — creating shared structures for production, exchange, and presentation across borders.
This means that projects developed within SEAR do not end in Schönbach. They continue to move: into presentations in Upper and Lower Lusatia, into partner institutions, festivals, and exhibitions, and into further collaborative formats.
At the same time, SEAR remains rooted in its local context. The work is shaped by the specific conditions of Lusatia — its landscapes, histories, communities, and ongoing transformations — and grows outward from there.
The aim is to create a space where projects can evolve over time: through follow-up invitations, continued collaborations, and the possibility to return, expand, or reconfigure what has been started here.
