Queen Mathilde Cultural Mentorship Awards

Can you reimagine the future of your city through design and creative problem-solving? This is an invitation to dream with us.

Building Beyond is an invitation to imagine what the future could be. In this call, we invite you to define the future of public space, community and functionality on a growing continent by activating the imagined possibilities of your localised contextualities.

Across the world, urban centres and youth populations are growing rapidly, but nowhere more so than on the African continent. With increased levels of population, polarising societies, anthropogenic climate change, and rising levels of inequality; we urgently need new perspectives and sustainable solutions for how we live and what the future could behold. We need radical ideas grounded in community and care. Ideas of hope that dream new realities into being.

At the Queen Mathilde Cultural Fund and the Creative Industries Fund-NL, we believe in making space for new generations of creatives who actively challenge dominant power structures and put forward new methods for engaging with communities. We believe in making space for unique perspectives on the world and in amplifying the exciting future-proof solutions you have for your communities. Our viewpoint is that these critical design practices and creatively driven solutions could catalyse new forms of activism, stimulate change, reaffirm agency and strengthen ownership.

This belief is at the core of Building Beyond, a new mentorship programme for individuals from 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.

Through Building Beyond, we are forming a space where you and your peers can reflect on the future of your communities. This is an alternative educational structure that aims at fostering thought leadership, promoting criticality, and reframing design-based practices. This programme is part of a longer conversation on how creative practices rooted in locality, community, queer theory, decoloniality and/or intersectional approaches can lead us toward new perspectives and fresher methodologies, as well as promote transformative urban agendas on how we inhabit the world and our continent. We invite creatives, designers, artists, thinkers, architects, and those working anywhere in-between to join us.