With the comic artist Ika Sperling, the city of Dortmund has a new city describer. She will use the scholarship from May to October 2025 to work on her new graphic novel, the city of Dortmund announced in a press release.
The comic, which tells a coming-of-age story, will be about young outsiders. “It’s about borders and crossing borders, about friendships among outsiders and about alternative youth spaces in the city that these young people take for themselves,” says Sperling, explaining her project. “A phenomenon that is probably also relevant in Dortmund. Who owns playgrounds, pedestrian zones and shopping centers at night on weekends? And who is taking this inanimate space?”
At the center of the story is a 15-year-old with a stoma, an artificial outlet for bodily waste. During her stay, Sperling wanted to make contacts with artists, social workers and activists.
During the six months of the scholarship, she receives an apartment and a monthly payment of 2,100 euros as well as a budget for events and travel costs.
Sperling, born in 1996, studied illustration at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg and works as a freelance illustrator. She co-organizes the Hamburg Comic Festival and was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize for her first graphic novel “The Great Reset”.
In it, the Hamburg artist describes, in partly semi-realistic and partly surrealistic sequences of images, how the first-person narrator’s father drifts completely into conspiracy ideologies during the Corona years and the family breaks up as a result. More about this book and its background here.
The city description scholarship has been awarded annually by the city of Dortmund since 2020 and is organized by the Dortmund Cultural Office in cooperation with the Literaturhaus Dortmund. Chrizzi Heinen from Berlin will be the city describer in Dortmund until the end of October. She is an author of narrative prose and radio plays, a musicologist and a visual artist.
Last year, Sperling was the first comic author to receive a scholarship Rottweiler got city clerk. In addition to working on her own projects, she also held public events and a writing workshop there.