28.03.2025 - Writing Residency - Call for candidates

Deadline: March 28, 2025, at 11:59 PM

APPLICATION FORM

As part of the symposium How to protect a radical idea?, organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of La Centrale, we invite two writers to take part in a writing residency in May 2025. In partnership with Esse art+opinions, the selected authors' texts will be published on Esse's web platform.  

ABOUT LA CENTRALE

La Centrale galerie Powerhouse is an artist-run center dedicated to the dissemination and development of multidisciplinary feminist practices. We support artists and practices that remain underrepresented in dominant cultural institutions through programming that engages with feminism, intersectionality, and social justice. Learn more about our mandate here. 

THE SYMPOSIUM

To mark its 50th anniversary, La Centrale galerie Powerhouse is organizing a symposium that will take place between May 16 and 31, 2025. This two-week event will bring together over twenty artists, curators, and cultural workers around the question: How to protect a radical idea?

Through a variety of formats— roundtables, conferences, workshops, performances, and installations—the symposium will create a space for reflection, sharing, and experimentation around strategies to preserve and sustain radical practices.

This event will address topics such as empathetic curatorial practices, resistance to overproductivity and the importance of rest, the transmission of invisible knowledge, tools for reconnecting with one's radical essence (both individually and collectively), as well as issues related to intersectional feminist knowledge and imaginaries, and the relationships between bodies, environment, and care.

Rooted in the radical spirit and sense of community that shaped La Centrale’s founding in the 1970s, this project draws from our past while maintaining a critical perspective on it. We hope to generate proposals for a sustainable future for Canadian artist-run centres by redefining healthy structures of governance, and encouraging the well-being of cultural workers and artists.

RESIDENCY MANDATE

The writing residency invites two writers to attend the symposium as active witnesses and critical observers. Following the event, each writer will have four weeks to produce a text of approximately 1,500 words, drawing from their experience at the symposium to develop a critical, poetic, or creative reflection. These texts will revisit one or more aspects of the symposium while exploring broader issues, providing a space designed to extend the dialogues initiated by the symposium.

Writers are invited to explore the themes of the symposium’s programming, as well as the notion of radicality and its connection to the practice of writing (in its content, form, process, or language).

Potential approaches include: analyzing language as a tool of oppression and/or resistance, imagining utopian or dystopian futures radically different from current systems, playing with narrative conventions, developing collective, performative, or ephemeral forms of writing where the process itself becomes an act of community engagement, navigating language hybridity or subaltern writings, engaging with anarchic approaches to academic writing, or questioning the possibilities and limits of radicality through words.

Consult Esse’s Editorial Protocol here

RESIDENCY RESOURCES AND SUPPORT

• Access to all symposium events from May 16 to 31, 2025

• An honorarium of $1,500

• Editorial support, revision, and translation of the text, if necessary

• Publication in Esse online magazine

• Publication in our 50th-anniversary publication project

ELIGIBILITY

• Open to anyone with a writing practice (writers, curators, art historians, poets, etc.)

• Familiarity with the issues and functioning of the Montreal artist-run center scene is an asset

• Availability to attend a minimum of three events between May 16 and 31, 2025

• Fluency in both French and English

HOW TO APPLY

To submit your application, please compile the following documents into a single PDF (5 Mb max) and submit it through our application form.

• A short introduction about yourself (maximum 500 words) or a video presentation (maximum 3 minutes). Feel free to mention any relevant experience in the field and explain how your project or practice connects to the theme and format of the symposium.

• Two writing samples (maximum 750 words each).

Deadline: March 28, 2025, at 11:59 PM
Selected applicants will be contacted in mid-April.

ACCESSIBILITY

La Centrale is committed to principles of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and equity. Please see La Centrale’s Basis of Unity and Anti-Harassment Policy for more information

The gallery space can be made wheelchair accessible upon request, and we are open to discussing any other accommodations that would facilitate participation. Applicants from outside Montreal are also encouraged to apply; however, we are unable to cover travel or accommodation expenses.