RADICAL REST RESIDENCY 2025

OPEN CALL
Radical Rest Residency

4 – 11 November, 2025
Marrakech, Morocco

A fully funded residency for FLINTA* of colour artists and cultural workers who are based in Germany.
Hosted by Oyoun, facilitated by SWANA Healing

 +++ Submit application here (before 20 July, midnight CET) +++

“Care is the antidote to violence” – Saidiya Hartman

Originally conceived at the onset of the pandemic, our residency formats have been building on a long tradition of refusal – a commitment to collective care in a world that treats us as disposable. What began as an artist-in-residence programme has evolved into a living, breathing space for radical rest: a countermeasure to extraction, a reclaiming of time, a practice of survival and liberation.

Rooted in Germany’s longstanding anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racial capitalism, the current political climate has far reachig consequences, from censorship of arts, culture and academia, to police violence and increasingly repressive migration policies. In light of these and many other racial disparities present in our society at large and the arts economy specifically, we offer these residencies to provide time to rest and restore, imagine and create.

The Radical Rest Residency is a week-long sanctuary held on the outskirts of Marrakech, Morocco. It is an invitation into collective softness, mourning, dreaming and listening, not as an escape, but as an act of insurgent care. Facilitated by SWANA HEALING (Elu & Rose), this space is not for production or presentation. It is for re-grounding, remembering, and regenerating.

Participants are invited to offer a gentle practice, story, or gesture of care during the week, not as labour or obligation, but as a shared holding. What happens when we rest together, unpoliced and unperformed? How does transnational solidarity unfold when we can be vulnerable? How does solidarity deepen when cultivated through care and presence?

Rest is not retreat. Rest is strategy. Rest is resistance.

// HOW TO APPLY

Eligibility: artists and cultural workers of all disciplines who identify as FLINTA* (women, lesbians, inter, non-binary, trans, agender) and of Global Majority background/  Black, Indigenous or People of Colour, aged 21+ and based in Germany, and seeking a space of collective rest and reimagining.

We particularly welcome folks to apply who have been affected by censorship, cancellation, silencing, e.g. in relation to solidarity with Palestine.

Dates: the residency will take place from 4 – 11 November 2025. Applications due July 20, with notification by July 25.

Support: Oyoun fully funds the residency. This includes travel expenses (flights from Berlin to Marrakech), local transportation costs (Morocco), accommodation (single/shared room), meals (vegan-vegetarian), facilitation by SWANA HEALING (Elu & Rose), and a modest honorarium of 500€ each. Residents are expected to cover additional personal living expenses, materials and supplies, and any other expenses unrelated to the residency.

Selection process: A multidisciplinary evaluation body of six members will evaluate submissions on the urgency of the proposal as well as the composition of all fellows for this residency cohort. Submissions will be evaluated solely on the content of the application and the decision by the evaluation does in no way offer judgment on the perceived quality of an applicant’s work.

Application consists of one form.

If you would like any further information or have any questions, please contact hallo@oyoun.de

// About SWANA Healing:

SWANA Healing is a transnational practice rooted in collective care and embodied resistance. Since 2021, their seasonal group gatherings and their weekly Solidarity Sessions since 2024 have offered a tender space for SWANA women* and LGBTQIA+ communities to grieve, breathe, and heal, together. Centering practices of presence over performance, they draw on regional traditions of storytelling, mindfulness and mutual witnessing.

In each session, participants are invited to be present alongside each other without performance or pressure. Using mindfulness, storytelling, visualization, and art-making, these gatherings are dedicated to being with collective grief, joy, and care, particularly in the context of ongoing struggles in Palestine, Sudan, Lebanon, and beyond.

The Radical Rest Residency in Morocco marks their third edition of an in-person gathering, deepening their commitment to holding space for collective restoration and intersectional solidarity.

The sessions are hosted by Rose Eskafi from Still Chill.
& Elu from deq-ttt.

More about their work here.

@swana.healing

// About Oyoun:

Oyoun is a dynamic space for intersectional artistic and sociocultural practices rooted in decolonial and queer*feminist thought. We centre voices and perspectives often sidelined by dominant cultural narratives, embracing embodied, experimental, and ephemeral forms of knowledge as vital to our work.

Guided by a for us, by us ethos, we challenge systemic exclusion and the entrenched hierarchies that shape art and society – disrupting divisions between North and South, centre and margin. At Oyoun, process takes precedence over product: through residencies, alternative education, and collective cultural projects, we cultivate care, solidarity, and sustained creative resistance.

Our antidisciplinary approach blurs boundaries between art, activism, theory, and lived experience, supporting practices that reflect the complexity of the communities we serve. Rooted in diasporic, neurodivergent, and class-conscious perspectives, Oyoun is a vital platform for radical cultural production, a place to belong, experiment, and imagine new
futures together.

@oyounberlin