Vision Lab: How to build a sustainable media practice, reach new audiences, and initiate change

The Vision Lab is a wide-open, deeply personal, challenging, and hands-on workshop for people who desire to develop journalism/film/photography beyond traditional limits, reach new audiences, build a sustainable media practice, and initiate change in the world.

The workshop will cover a wide range of alternative publication and financing strategies for documentary work. It will dive into grant writing, expert status, personal brand, and professional identity. It focuses on the long tail and explores what makes projects connectable to contexts far beyond media. It aims to help you develop your personal and professional vision, projects, and strategies.

In previous versions of the Vision Lab, participants have created linear web documentaries and storyboards; developed ideas on how to build a publication bridge from print, online, and mobile into spatial installations and theatre plays; written proposals and financing plans; and developed concepts for tying individual stories into a larger narrative. Others clarified where they wanted to go professionally, identified new markets and audiences, and built a strategy for reaching them. So, whether you are just starting your career, want to give it a new direction, or looking to take your project to the next level, the Vision Lab is for you.

Who it’s for

• You have a project you can’t quite get off the ground. You know what you want to make; you don’t yet know how to fund it, structure it, or carry it through to audiences beyond a single magazine spread.
• You’re at a turning point. You’re successful by most measures, but you want your next chapter to feel different. More meaningful, more sustainable, more yours.
• You want to reconnect to why you started. The craft still matters to you. You’re looking for a week of serious thinking with people who take the work as seriously as you do.

Who leads it

Uwe H. Martin is an artist, visual storyteller, slow journalist, and teacher. Since 2007, he and his partner, Frauke Huber, have documented global agriculture’s social and environmental consequences in LandRush, a project that has taken the form of magazine features, exhibitions, multichannel installations, linear web documentaries, artist books, participatory mappings, and performances.

Uwe co-founded the international art and research project World of Matter; Aggrey’s Dream, which supports a school in Mombasa, Kenya, with four teachers, a school lunch program, and a bakery that generates independent income for the school; RiffReporter, Germany’s largest author-owned journalism cooperative; and Transformation Journalism, which explores how storytellers can become agents of eco-social change.

He teaches photography, film, journalism, and planet-centric design at universities and workshops worldwide, and lives between Schlehdorf in Bavaria and Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea, where he is building a research campus for teams working on the water-food-energy-climate nexus.

Dates: 29th June – 4th July 2026

Location: Centre national de l’audiovisuel. 1B, rue du Centenaire. L-3475 Dudelange

Audience: Professional photographers, professional filmmakers, writers, journalists, photography/audiovisual students.

Languages: English, German

Prices:

• Normal: 300€
• Reduced: 150€ (students, jobseekers, intermittent entertainment workers, self-employed professional artists, on presentation of documentary evidence)

Max. number of participants: 8

Terms of enrolment: Please send your application with a short description of your questions and what you like to achieve, your biography and links to your work to: formation@cna.etat.lu.

Deadline for applications: May 30, 2026