The Contemporary Creation Centre Nau Côclea and the Museu Memorial de l’Exili (Exile Memorial Museum) invite artists to apply for the Walter Benjamin Creation Grant 2026.
For thirteen years, the Walter Benjamin Route has invited artists to engage with questions of memory, borders, exile, critical history and the act of walking itself. Artists are asked to create an experience that unfolds along the path, in dialogue with landscape, participants and the legacy of Walter Benjamin.
It is also an invitation to artists who understand walking as an artistic practice and who seek forms of creation beyond the production of objects. Rather than exhibiting work in a gallery or museum, participants have to develop an experience that unfolds along a mountain path, in dialogue with landscape, memory, history and the people who walk together.
Each year, the Walter Benjamin Route retraces the path followed by Benjamin and Lisa Fittko across the Pyrenees in September 1940, while fleeing Nazi persecution. Along this route, artists are invited to engage with questions that remain profoundly relevant today: migration, displacement, political violence, memory, resistance and the possibility of imagining other ways of inhabiting the world.
The grant supports the development of an artistic intervention to be presented during a collective walk from Banyuls-sur-Mer (France) to Portbou (Catalonia), where the selected artist will create a site-specific proposal to be experienced during the walk itself, within the broad field of Walking Art.
Applications are open to all artistic disciplines, including performance, sound art, visual arts, poetry, music, dance, public art and interdisciplinary practices.
Previous recipients include Kubra Khademi, whose performance retraced Benjamin’s final journey by walking backwards; Anna Dot, who revived censored texts by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt through a network of “book people”; Nieves Correa, whose work transformed the route into a collective act of remembrance; and Anna Guillo, whose poetic interventions reactivated Benjamin’s legacy through site-specific actions along the path.
The 2026 grant is endowed with €1,400, including artist fees, travel and production costs. The walk will take place on 27 September 2026. The application deadline is 5 July 2026.
Go here for details on the grant.
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