Villa Aurora Grant Recipients | 2025
Jul, Aug, Sep
Elena Herrmann | Visual Art

Elena Herrmann is a visual artist, performer, and musician. She is currently studying with Jimmy Robert at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work has dealt with themes of individualism, optimization, exhaustion and destruction. During a semester abroad in Japan and in light of current geopolitical political developments, she has begun to deepen her interest in the implications of “crisis” and “catastrophe.”
In a performance film set at Villa Aurora and with the working title It’s another day of sun, Elena Herrmann will use acting, dance and music to explore the topic of (existential) crisis, and above all how to deal with this presumed crisis. To this end, she will take on different roles in various episodes, each portraying the fears, worries, wishes and hopes of the characters in monologues, song and dance interludes. In the film, Villa Aurora serves not as a place of involuntary exile but as a setting for a self-imposed spiritual idyll far away from bad news and bad realities. After many years of constant dawn, it is haunted by the first night, the crisis. Questioning the concept of crisis, Elena wants to understand it as a turning point in a story with an open end, i. e., with the possibility of a good ending.
Elena Herrmann is a Villa Aurora Fellow courtesy of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
Selected Works and Performances
2024 | We do not allow fallen maidens here – performance in the group exhibition Chez Abîme, gallery Treize, Paris
2023 | Cut in Half – album release under the moniker Eddna and release concert at Silent Green Kuppelhalle, Berlin
2022 | Configuration of Charlotte Posenenske’s Vierkantrohre Serie D with Jimmy Robert’s class at Berlin University of the Arts, CCA Berlin
2021 | AMNION – exhibition and film screening at DZIALDOV gallery, Berlin
2021 | listen/thel – performance in the group exhibition Beyond over it, Nåpoleon Komplex, Berlin
2021 | Cycle of (it)self – performance at GW35 gallery, Berlin
Awards/Scholarships
since 2023 | Scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
2023 | Nominated in the category “Electronic und Experimental” by the association Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for the album Cut in Half
2022 | Pop Stipendium from the Bundesverband Popularmusik e.V. (grant to work on a new music album)