British Council | Mentorship Award Moving Narratives

Dominant historical and social narratives tend to exclude the experiences and stories of marginalised communities, silence critical voices, and erase, overlook, or at times over-emphasise differences. Presenting one-sided or partial accounts of history, these narratives often reflect systems of power and contribute to social inequalities.

Are you an artist or cultural practitioner who believes that culture can play a vital role in questioning dominant narratives and their role in our lives? The British Council invites you to apply to 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 their historical roots.

Programme

With the Mentorship Award: Moving Narratives, the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council will bring together 12 experienced, socially and politically engaged artists and cultural practitioners (± 7-15 years of relevant professional experience) working across diverse mediums, approaches, and interpretations of the mentorship’s overarching theme.

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. Applications from artists working from their lived experiences and own communities are incouraged, and practices that focus on intersectional and locally-rooted perspectives that challenge dominant worldviews.

To foster conversations and collaborations within the cohort, and to support each artist in their practice, this pilot programme will adopt various interactive formats that range from workshops, reading groups, guest talks, and peer-to-peer review sessions. Most of the activities will be online, but the cohort will come together twice in person for the Labs (six-day intensive mentoring sessions). Within the framework of the programme, the cohort will collectively create a joint project in the form of a printed publication and an online platform.

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.

Eligibility

With this open call The British Council invites applications from individual, experienced artists and cultural practitioners who:

• Live and work in our 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 we 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.

Deadline: 10 August 2023

Apply here