CALL FOR APPLICATIONS MENTORSHIP BUILDING BEYOND

By the Prince Claus Fund & the Creative Industries Fund NL

This is an opportunity to shape the future of public spaces and communities within your African city.

Our urban environments are more than just spaces for living. Existence in the city is formed by the intersection and interaction of people and objects, spaces and material, and personal and shared identities. The urban environment and its peripheries are in a constant process of (re)arrangement, movement, and negotiation - with many loops of access, boundary, causation, and opportunity. However, with increasing urbanisation, cities are shifting in response to the high pressures of imposed modernisation, changes in climate, and burgeoning populations with implications for ways of living together in city spaces. With this, there is a need for space to call into question what cities we are shaping and what we are losing in the cities that we build.

African cities, their peripheries, and their (sub)communities are continuously consolidating the material conditions of the physical city with the dynamics of the living city. As such, African cities are poised as places of fluidity and (re)configuration that move the built environment out of its perceived confines. They allow us to look at the constellations that our urban environments hold and as we move forward in our city-making they prompt us to ask: Who narrates? Who represents? Who creates? Who is invited? Who belongs?

Building Beyond is a learning structure where artists come together with a group of peers to reflect on their practice, activate it within their local context, and collectively assemble ideas and universalities from across the continent - aimed at engaging with the built environment as an interpretive and alterable world. We support practices that engage with the relational worlds of communities and public space in this setting. We seek to foster conversations on how resilience, humanity, and creativity in our urban environments can create opportunities for communally imagined realities in the city.

The programme brings together 12 experienced creatives (± 7-15 years of relevant professional experience) working across diverse mediums, approaches, and interpretations of the mentorship’s overarching theme. Supported by four mentors, this Building Beyond cohort will come together over the course of a year to foster conversation, collaboration, and equal exchange; to support each participant in their own individual practice; and facilitate exchanges between the cohort, its growing network, and relevant external practitioners.

Building Beyond consists of various online interactive formats, such as peer group sessions, and guest speaker sessions. We will also meet in person twice within the programme year in the form of ‘Lab Weeks’ (six-day intensive mentoring gatherings)—one in the African continent, and one in the Netherlands. The programme carries two group projects for the cohort, namely: a public-facing event opportunity, and a collective publication. In addition to this, each participant receives an award of €10.000 and guidance from mentors to work on the concept for a body of work that is 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 it's content.

Eligibility

With this open call, we invite applications from individual, experienced artists and cultural practitioners who: 

• Are from, live and work in our eligible countries: Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania, Tunisia, Chad, South Africa, or South-Sudan.
• Are artists, cultural practitioners, or creatives whose individual practice relates to architecture, design, spatial practice, public space, and urban communities. When referring to artists and cultural practitioners we mean people who have an individual artistic practice. We hold a broad definition of art and culture and appreciate interdisciplinary practices. 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 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.