TRANSIENT Academy 2026

Kloster Steinfeld / Eifel
March 12–15, 2026

To all musicians, sound artists, composers, and curators: The TRANSIENT Academy will open its doors in 2026 and offers you the chance to participate in an exceptional creative project.

Contemporary music, improvisation, sound art and/or curating your own events are exactly your thing? You want to present and deepen your artistic work, gather fresh impulses, and explore how your projects can merge with Creative Ecology and local communities?

Then you’ve come to the right place: For 2026 we are awarding ten scholarships to creative talents up to the age of 35.

Here’s what awaits you: Four versatile and experienced mentors will guide you through an intensive, interdisciplinary program. Participation for the selected scholarship recipients is free of charge—including meals and accommodation at the atmospheric Kloster Steinfeld, Eifel. The Academy is part of the four-year TRANSIENT project “Music for Places” in the North Eifel, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation within the program LOKAL. It brings together young cultural practitioners from Germany and Europe, fosters exchange, networking, and the development of new ideas in contemporary music and sound art.

Apply now and become part of a creative experiment that reconnects spaces, people, landscapes, and sounds.

Apply now for one of only ten scholarships and become part of the TRANSIENT Academy!

Application

Please apply by January 30, 2026 to academy@transientimpuls.com with a short CV and a video link in which you briefly present the project you would like to introduce and work on during the TRANSIENT Academy.

After the application deadline, we will contact you with an acceptance or rejection, or to invite you to an additional video call if we have further questions. We look forward to your application!

Mentors 2026

Karola Obermüller, Composer
Folkert Uhde, Concert Design
Jeremias Schwarzer, Musician and Artistic Director of TRANSIENT
Reinhard Horstkotte, Clown and Artistic Director of Rote Nasen e.V.

What is Creative Ecology?

In this context, “Creative Ecology” refers to a form of creativity that understands itself as part of the generative force of the Earth. Drawing on the concept of “Deep Ecology,” advocated by the American philosopher Joanna Macy and others, it is about the deeply felt need of artists to dissolve—for themselves—the concept of separation between humans and the Earth, which forms the basis of the planet’s exploitation, also within their artistic practice.

Indigenous cultures understood the importance of celebrating the cycles of life and linking everyday actions with songs that kept the Earth’s aliveness present in consciousness. This fusion of “art” and “nature” has unfortunately long disappeared from collective awareness: “we have broken the great conversation” (Thomas Berry).

But especially in our present time of uncertainties and transitions into the unknown, it can be important to find artistic themes and practices that bring one’s own creativity into awareness as a connection to the aliveness of the planet.

Download Call for Applications as PDF

TRANSIENT Academy 2026 Call for Applications

Funding partners of the TRANSIENT Academy 2026

Funded by the LOKAL programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) and the European Cultural Foundation. The German Federal Cultural Foundation is funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).

The TRANSIENT cultural projects use artistic means to address topics and projects that are important for everyone in our current time of transitions.  An interdisciplinary team of artists around the musician and university professor Jeremias Schwarzer develops the ideas together with members of local communities, which are also involved in all steps of the creative process. In this way, creativity can be experienced by all as a future oriented source.

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Link to application in Bio! Work on your projects