building beyond mentorship 2025 for artists in africa

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.

Kindly note that this is the last year in which Building Beyond will run, and we encourage you to apply to be a part of its final constellation!