Artist Residency 2022
Clara Ehrenwerth
Through its residency programmes, the Goethe-Institut seeks to provide a space for new perspectives. Particularly in the age of globalisation, it is especially inspiring for artists and culture producers to ground their works in specific, real places and to pursue their projects for a while, free from economic considerations and to build up or deepen lasting professional contacts. Artists will be nominated. Applications are not possible. Each year, with its residency programmes and their variety of focuses, the Goethe-Institut New Zealand in cooperation with Wellington City Council offers artists and other culture creator’s opportunities to live and work in Wellington for a period of time. The residency programme’s focus is not on one-time presentations. Instead, the projects’ success and significance become evident in long-term exchange and lasting co-operation between the artists. For the first time since 2020, the 2022 Residency will be held again in Presence.
Residency artist 2022: Clara Ehrenwerth
Clara is a writer, game designer and executive director at machina eX.
Born in 1987 in Blankenburg/Harz, Germany, she studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. From 2008 to 2011 she was co-editor of the contemporary German-language literary magazine BELLA triste and also served as a member of the artistic direction and project manager at the literature festival PROSANOVA 2011 in Hildesheim.
She has received several awards for her literary work, including a prize from the Young Literature Forum Hesse-Thuringia and a working scholarship from the Free State of Thuringia. Since 2014 she has been working with the theater collective machina eX, where she’s the executive director since 2018.
The collective specializes mainly on interactive stage adventure games by exploring the intersection of theater and computer games. By combining modern technologies with the means of classical illusion theater, machina eX creates immersive playable theater pieces that are also walk-through computer games. Their performances have been positively reviewed in the Washington Post and various, renowned German newspapers.
Please find some reviews below:
“Clever computer-game-like entertainment” ”Although [...] fun to play, it also serves as a bizarre sociological experiment.” listed on “11 things to do in the D.C. area”.
– The Washington Post
“Flexibility and the openness give the 'Machina eX' productions their appeal. They are unquestionably among the most consistently conceived connections between game and theater.”
– Spiegel Online
“This is the future of theater! Gameplay and theater: the best of both worlds combined.”
– Bayrischer Rundfunk
