SBYD.SPACE explores new climate-neutral and resource-light ways of living and production. It transfers knowledge from sustainability research into society and the economy through design. The capability of design in making theories and abstract concepts tangible – and transferring them into everyday life – is used to explore, discuss, and test these theories and ideas in practice.
SBYD.SPACE engages with diverse audiences and collaborators through a range of formats, including workshops, international symposia, exhibitions, an artist / designer in residence program and support for entrepreneurial endeavours. It is located at Folkwang University of the Arts’ North Campus at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein, a former coal mine in Germany’s Ruhr region – a location that could not be more symbolic for the transformation of industries, ways of life, and entire regions.
SBYD.SPACE awards Artist / Designer in Residence scholarships each year.
From 1 March 2026 to 31 May 2026, Folkwang University of the Arts, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Mexico, is offering two Artist/Designer in Residence scholarships on the subjects of »Food« and »Textile« for Mexican artists or designers. The application deadline for this Open Call is 15 December 2025. Details of the programme and the application procedure can be found in the PDF here.
SBYD.SPACE Residency 2025
Final presentation and artist talk with Li Actuallee and Vinay Khare
11–14 December, Gartensaal, Museum Folkwang, Essen
Opening: 11 December, 6 p.m.
The final presentations of the SBYD.SPACE Residency 2025 showcase the work created during the residency by Indian artists Li Actuallee (textiles) and Vinay Khare (tech), who spent three months developing their work at the Folkwang University of the Arts.
Li Actuallee – STITCHPUNK: INFUSED / Labour as Resource
Li’s work focuses on invisible labour and asks how it can be made visible. Using knitting and crochet techniques and specially developed tools – such as carbon-coated fingers or crochet hooks with pigment – Li creates textiles that record tension, gestures, fatigue and breaks. Each stitch thus becomes a trace of time, labour and physicality, and the finished object becomes a place of embodied memory.
The work refers to Marx’s writings on alienated labour and contemporary critiques of craft economies, which show that craftspeople today must commercialise their identity and time. By combining soft textile techniques with pigments that reference industrialised labour, the project questions the boundaries between “hard” and “soft”, manual and emotional, personal and political labour.
In his ‘Digital Compost Lab,’ Vinay Khare makes digital overproduction and data waste visible and tangible. Through participatory experiments, digital media are transformed and reimagined as a resource. The project reveals the invisible traces of digital overproduction and reflects on how digital data can be used as a renewable raw material. Using analogue technologies such as cassettes and tape loops, Vinay makes the physical and temporal qualities of data tangible and connects analogue and digital worlds.