From the playground into the artist’s studio
Children and young people are creative and want to make things. For this to happen, their creativity needs to be nurtured, ideally in the place where they spend most of their time – namely in school.
So the Crespo Foundation thought: Why not simply bring art and culture directly to children in the playground? Together with the Hesse Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs and the Hesse Ministry of Science and the Arts, the flying artist’s room was launched in 2018 as a new cultural education programme in schools.
The flying artist’s room – a mobile live-in studio – and the artist’s presence allow the arts to be encountered in everyday school life and provide inspiration for the school’s development as part of an integrated education.
In the course of its collaboration with an artist, the school can develop teaching models and change structures so that artistic practice and aesthetic experiences are embedded in everyday life at school, even after the flying artist’s room takes off for another school.
In addition, a bond of trust can develop between the artist in the flying artist’s room and the students and teachers that gives them the scope to express their own personality.
During the 2025/2026 school year, a total of five flying artist’s rooms are being hosted in rural parts of Hesse on the playgrounds of Schlüchtern Municipal School, Walter Lübcke School in Wolfhagen, Battenberg School, Käthe Kollwitz School in Langenselbold and Marie Durand School in Bad Karlshafen. On board are the artist duo g.a.d.o. and artists Sophia Mix, Sopo Kashakashvili, Dawid Liftinger and Johannes Jakobi.
Overview
Duration
Each flying artist’s room takes up residence in the playground of a school in rural Hesse for two or three school years.
The architecture
The mobile live-in studio was specially designed for the flying artist’s room by the architects Prof. Nikolaus Hirsch and Prof. Dr. Michel Müller. The building, which is around 7.50 x 11 metres and has an area of approximately 80 square metres, is closed on two sides, and has a small-format wooden shingle façade. Inside there is a generously proportioned studio illuminated from above by natural light, whose clear height of up to 3.50 metres exceeds standard container dimensions and therefore again creates a studio ambiance.
The schools
Schlüchtern Municipal School
Schlüchtern Municipal School is a combined vocational and general secondary school in the Main-Kinzig district and has around 750 students and 60 teachers. It is certified as having an emphasis on music and in the 2021/2022 school year was included in Hesse’s schools of culture programme.
Walter Lübcke School
Walter Lübcke School in Wolfhagen is a cooperative comprehensive school with an academic sixth form in the district of Kassel and has around 1,350 students. With its renaming as Walter Lübcke School in 2020, the school community wanted to send a clear message about democracy and social cohesion.
Battenberg School
Battenberg School is a cooperative comprehensive school in the district of Waldeck-Frankenberg and has around 850 students in grades 5 to 10. Given the school’s rural location, Battenberg School takes students from around ten primary schools and 20 different towns and villages.
Käthe Kollwitz School
Käthe Kollwitz School (KKS), or “Käthe” for short, is a combined comprehensive school in the district of Main-Kinzig. It was established in 1969 and became a cultural school of the state of Hesse in 2021. 850 students from Langenselbold and surrounding communities attend “Käthe”, which employs 70 teachers. KKS sees itself as a versatile and intercultural local education facility.
Marie Durand School
Marie Durand School in Bad Karlshafen is an integrated comprehensive school for grades 5 to 10. It serves as a local school for numerous communities in the region and is also attended by students from neighbouring states. Around 520 students are currently taught by around 40 teachers.
The artist-in-residence bursary
This bursary is intended for artists who, alongside their own creative work, have experience of cultural educational activity with children and young people in schools. It includes use of the live-in studio on the school playground and comes with a living allowance of 2,500 euros per month. In addition, the artist receives an allowance of 6,000 euros per year for material and expenses for their own work and for their collaboration with students.
The 2025/2026 school year
From the start of the 2025/2026 school year, five flying artist’s rooms are being hosted on five playgrounds in Hesse.
The artists
g.a.d.o.
Artists Paloma Sanchez-Palencia and Lena Skrabs have been working together as artistic duo g.a.d.o. since 2016. They moved into the flying artist’s room at Schlüchtern Municipal School at the beginning of the 2022/2023 school year.
Dawid Liftinger
Dawid Liftinger moved into his flying artist’s room at Walter Lübcke School in the district of Kassel in the summer of 2023. He offers students and teachers there an open space for experimenting, trying things out and improvising.
Sophia Mix
An interdisciplinary artist who specialises in narrative performance, Sophia Mix has been creating and living in the flying artist’s room on the playground of Battenberg School since the 2024/2025 school year. Mix is interested in utopias, in the vitality of things and in magic.
Sopo Kashakashvili
Sopo Kashakashvili is the flying artist at Käthe Kollwitz School in Langenselbold. The work of the Georgia-born artist includes performance, video, music, sculpture, drawing/assemblage, text and stage design.
Johannes Jakobi
As artist in residence, Johannes Jakobi moved into the flying artist’s room on the playground of Marie Durand School in Bad Karlshafen for the 2025/2026 school year. He feels that art offers a space where one can dare to test boundaries, explore and experiment.
The collaboration between the artist and the school
For three days a week, in close collaboration with teachers at the school and spanning classes and subjects, the artists develop artistic approaches to open up new aesthetic perspectives on curriculum content for children and young people. On top of this, the artists also provide open studio situations for their collaboration with students.