FACT is inviting artists living or working in the North of England to create work during lockdown. The scheme, entitled FACT Together, will offer 10 early-career artists a grant of £1,500 each plus 3 months of support to develop an idea that will be presented online.

Alongside this, each artist will receive mentorship from the FACT team who will support them in the development, production and promotion of their proposals. This professional development will also include group sessions with all recipients of FACT Together, creating a virtual support network. All contact between FACT and the artists will be online, ensuring that everyone is encouraged to stay home and keep safe.

They are looking for proposals that will respond to The Living Planet. This theme examines our relationship with the natural world, exploring ways in which wildlife, plantlife and ecological systems have responded to the impact of human actions.

The main areas of interest are:

• The importance of non-human perspectives and how different ways of seeing, and communicating, change and challenge the way we see the world around us, and our place within it. How does the way we see the world, and the way we communicate restrict us? How might we use art and digital culture to overcome these barriers or disrupt the norm?
• The systems of which we are all a part of, and how actions affect not only one area, but everything. How can understanding the planet in this way alter our behaviours, as well as our relationships with those who may not be able to affect the system itself?
• How do we define a community? How do we create trust between, and care for, those within our community? What possibilities are there for humans and other species to be better aligned once we start to see broader connections?
• The importance of rituals to human life, and how non-humans (plants and animals) feature heavily within rituals in many cultures. How do our rituals -including everything from daily digital rituals to those more spiritual ones- reinforce alienation, and how can they instead help us move towards understanding, compassion and representation?

They welcome all forms of online work and encourage a diversity of media: audio, video, text, games, app design, virtual or augmented reality, performance, socially-engaged practice, web or desktop interventions, animation, social media takeovers and workshops. They are particularly keen to receive proposals from artists who are looking to develop their practice, so you do not need to have previously created digital or online work.

Proposals will be assessed by FACT’s Programme Team and selected on their response to this brief, how well they articulate FACT’s 2020 theme of The Living Planet, and their feasibility within the budget and timeline. The final project should be ready to go online in July and August 2020.

ELIGIBILITY

• FACT Together is open to all artists living and working in the North of England (as defined by Arts Council England which includes North West, Yorkshire and North East).
• This scheme is aimed at early-career artists. They define an early-career artist as someone in the early stages of their professional career as an artist. This is usually someone who has been working on their practice for more than 2 years.

KEY DATES

Deadline for proposals: Sunday 26 April 2020 at midnight

Outcome of decision and all applicants informed: Friday 1 May 2020

Initial conversations with selected artists: Monday 4 – Friday 8 May 2020

Online or digital work ready to go live: July – August 2020

https://www.fact.co.uk/news/2020/04/fact-together-new-online-commissioning-scheme-to-support-artists-in-lockdown