Open call: Prince Claus Fund Building Beyond programme

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

The programme brings together 12 experienced creatives (plus or minus seven to 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. 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, applications are invited from individual, experienced artists and cultural practitioners who:

• Are from, live and work in the 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 and 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, the Prince Claus Fund means people who have an individual artistic practice.
• Have plus-minus 7 to 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.

Note: Due to the nature of the mentorship programme, applicants need to be able to communicate in English.

Interested creatives can apply here before 14 May. Read the guidelines here before applying.

“We support practices that engage with the relational worlds of communities and public space in this setting,” the Prince Claus Fund said. “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.”

View the original call here.