Deadline: 10-Aug-23
Are you an artist or cultural practitioner who believes that culture can play a vital role in questioning dominant narratives and their role in lives? The Prince Claus Fund invites you to apply for the Mentorship Award: Moving Narratives, a multidisciplinary programme that re-examines legacies of the past, defies euro-centric social and historical discourses, centres the perspectives of marginalised communities, and forges connections between contemporary emancipatory movements and historical roots.
Supported by four mentors, participants will be encouraged to collectively experiment, exchange, and develop artistic strategies that address dominant narratives and the inequalities they perpetuate, whether they are based on gender, race, class, or other intersectional issues.
Goals
- The Mentorship Award: Moving Narratives will be carried out with three main goals in mind:
- to foster conversation, collaboration, and exchange within the cohort;
- to support each artist in their own individual practice; and,
- to facilitate interchanges between the cohort and relevant external practitioners.
Programme Structure
- To facilitate inter-cohort connections, the programme will encourage participants to interact in group and sub-group sessions throughout the year, ranging from presentations to workshops and in-person Lab Weeks. To support the participants’ individual artistic practice, there will be encounters in sub-groups and one-on-one sessions with the mentors to dive further into the development of the participants’ body of work.
- The Mentorship Award: Moving Narratives programme will consist of:
- Introduction: aimed at acquainting the group. In two consecutive weeks at the start of the mentorship in January/February 2024, everyone in the group will introduce themselves and the concept/body of work that they will be working on throughout the programme.
- Three Thematic Chapters: taking place in an online format and include guest talks, workshops, reading groups, sub-group sessions, and one-on-one sessions. Each chapter spans approximately 6 to 8 weeks. The content of the chapters will be oriented by three intersecting domains:
- Creative expressions: focusing on formal experimentation and various mediums of narrative building
- Socio-political engagement: focusing on grass root movements, community building, and the intersections between creative practices and their social and political actualities.
- Dissemination: focusing on modes of transmitting and disseminating critical narratives to the wider public and community.
- Lab Weeks: in-person meeting moments that run for a total of 6 days (excluding travel). The goal is to spur a collective feeling amongst the group, get acquainted with the rhythms and challenges of the group’s individual practices, gain inspiration and for participants to share their work with a different city and its practitioners through a range of workshops, site visits, and situated experiences centered on the themes and disciplines of the group. The Lab Weeks will take place in the first and third quarters of the programme.
- Group Project: a collective project aimed at reflecting the group’s individual and collective interactions and developments throughout the mentorship. The group project goes beyond documenting what has happened during the programme, and instead provides a space where the group can express their creative processes and exchanges to a broader audience. The group project consists of a publication element and a website element.
- Closing Chapter: the programme comes to a close in a similar format to how it began, with online presentations from all of the participants in which they highlight where their body of work has developed and how they intend to engage with it in the future. These presentations are semi-public.
Award Details
- Additionally, each participant will receive an award of €10.000 to work on the project or body of work outlined in their application.
- While the grant is not limited to a strict project plan or budget, the participant’s proposed project will be used as a baseline for the programme and will orient the one-on-one sessions with the mentors.
Duration
- The programme will begin in January/February 2024 and will be ongoing consistently for the duration of a year.
Eligibility Criteria
- With this open call they invite applications from individual, experienced artists and cultural practitioners who:
- Live and work in their eligible countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe;
- Are artists, cultural practitioners, or creatives whose practice highlights marginalised histories that challenge dominant worldviews; The Prince Claus Fund and the British Council hold a broad disciplinary understanding of arts and culture. When referring to artists and cultural practitioners they mean people who have an individual artistic practice. Individuals who are arts managers, facilitators, academic researchers or others, without an individual artistic practice, do not fall under this category, and as such are not eligible to apply.
- Have ±7-15 years of relevant professional experience. The Mentorship Award is meant only for individual artists who, regardless of age, meet the professional experience criteria, counting from the date they started engaging in a professional artistic practice to the date of submitting their application.
- Due to the nature of the mentorship programme, applicants need to be able to communicate in English.
For more information, visit Prince Claus Fund.