2025 Scholarship Program

Networks of Mutual Aid

Wyvern Art Fund Scholarship Program
April – July 2025

Amidst the changing political climate and the imminent public cultural funding cut, the need for a resilient grassroots mutual-aid network for Berlin-based art collectives and communities (e.g. communities based on a specific creative medium, non-profit arts / tech Vereins, etc.)  is becoming more pressing. In this Scholarship Program, we are exploring possible designs for inter-community (counter-)infrastructure which can be practically implemented as mechanisms (such as digital infrastructure) and habits (such as regular events and gatherings) for physical resource and knowledge / expertise exchange.

What kind of creative solutions and mutual aid systems are already in place in the city, and what more can we imagine and bring about? What kind of alternative, peer to peer, collaboration focused mutual-aid systems and meta-communities do we need in this time and age in Berlin? How can the digital truly serve the digital? What is the first small step we can make together on the journey of realizing a more suitable resource-exchange intranet for our communities in Berlin? This scholarship program provides a design-oriented research space to answer these questions and open up new possibilities of modern-age inter-community coordination.

This call invites artists and thinkers to come together for a 4-month collective research and infrastructure design project to explore an implementable digital prototype that facilitates local mutual aid and support within Berlin. We are looking to create material systems that are here to stay, be it about information and knowledge sharing, match-making, building a resource exchange system, archiving, or other needed tools we can dream up. Where does the power of collective action lie, and what are we capable of when we are connecting the dots on an inter-collective level? The program involves working with existing local communities and collectives on better understanding their needs and wishes as a starting point for creating digital infrastructure. Technical consultation in programming, web development and databases to ensure implementability is offered to enable the creation of digital configurations. Artists with interdisciplinary backgrounds, community-oriented hearts, and strategic minds are welcome to apply.

For this program, we are looking to fund 6-8 artists and thinkers for the period of 4 months.

Core Value: The point of our (counter-)infrastructural building is to support our radical reimaginations of alternative togetherness in the city of Berlin. We want to care for each other, nourish each other, share joy together, and do so sustainably. Where we build digital infrastructure, such digital infrastructures should serve our physical togetherness and enable more fluid coordination.

STRUCTURE

The program is structured in the form of participatory 3-day workshops during which we’ll be getting to know each other, forming groups and setting research goals, as well as designing and creating infrastructure together over food. The program culminates in a launch party where we reveal the usable infrastructural prototypes.

SCHEDULE

2025 April – 2025 July

Commitment: Three-day sessions 2-3 times a month, group and individual research/design work in between meetings: Biweekly in-person meetings on three consecutive days of the week (Tuesday to Thursday, except for the last week of April where we meet from Monday to Wednesday) during the day (approximately 10am – 4pm) from April to July, in Schillerkiez, Neukölln, Berlin.

Three-day sessions: (Tuesday – Thursday)

April 1st – 3rd
April 15th – 17th
April 28th – 30th (Monday – Wednesday!)
May 13th – 15th
June 3rd – 5th
June 17th – 19th
July 1st – 3rd
July 15th – 17th

Output sessions / launch party:
21st to 31st of July, to be decided together

PROJECT OUTPUT

The choice will be given to distribute research collaboration outcomes and prototypes in various formats fitting to the specific project in addition to a launch party / exhibition at the end of July.

Events

Wyvern Art Fund is pleased to present Networks of Mutual Aid (NOMA), a culminating series of launch events of the 2025 Wyvern Art Fund Scholarship program which has brought together eight artists and thinkers over four-months to explore possible designs for inter-community (counter-)infrastructures.

Participants include Arc, Chris Dake-Outhet, Ziyad Hawwas, Miji Ih, Eren İleri, Nat Skoczylas, Juan Pablo García Sossa, and Rain Lena Wegmann.

NOMA is an ongoing, decentralized collective effort to build mutual aid networks including tools such as NOMA WIKI, a self-hosted, wiki-to-print platform for sharing resources, knowledge, space, equipment, time, wisdom, and care with a RAG-powered locally-based LLM for interactive archiving; NOMA Potluck, a shared library seeding and feeding practice; NOMA Berlin Events Calendar, a federated, self-organized, socio-cultural and political community calendar; Enoki Meshroom, an experiment with mesh network devices for under-the-radar communication; Slurrrplus, ongoing research on commons and surplus production; and a Liquidarity Savings Fund to support local organisers, communities and mutual aid efforts.

Launch events for these efforts will take place at offline on Thursday, July 24 and Casino for Social Medicine on Tuesday, July 29. See further information below.