CURRICULUM
This isn’t your typical residency, course, or workshop. It’s a mind-bending, intimate, spacious experience where you turn inwards and study your own critical art-making process.
The week-long curriculum is tailor-made for ambitious racialised artists and designers who explore socio-political contexts at an intermediate or advanced level. ︎︎︎Read about the process, location, costs, and eligibility below.
We will host two cohorts annually in Aarhus, Denmark. Apply through our open call, announced twice a year.
Next application period
January - February 2025
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why apply?
You’re ready for deepening your political commitments to an intermediate or advanced level.
You want to know how to bring together the critical theory you’re reading about, the things you’re making, and the everyday things you’re experiencing.
You’re craving a kind of space you can feel seen, feel heard, and get to the actual work. A space exclusively by and for racialised artists.
You want to know how to bring together the critical theory you’re reading about, the things you’re making, and the everyday things you’re experiencing.
You’re craving a kind of space you can feel seen, feel heard, and get to the actual work. A space exclusively by and for racialised artists.
Many racialised artists who work and study in white-normative contexts often work in near total isolation—surrounded by peers, mentors, professors, and institutions who negate their experience. It’s exhausting. If you know, you know.
process
The unique process is focused on 3 things:
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︎︎︎Artist members of the New Museum x NEW INC participate in a workshop in 2017, Matter–Mind Studio co-founded by Lillian Tong, Myriam Diatta, Colleen Doyle | New York City, US
The curriculum runs over a period of 5 consecutive days. Each day is guided with facilitation and studio time. The process is facilitated by Myriam Diatta, Black-Asian independent scholar and former educator at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute. She will facilitate the workshop in partnership with one BIPoC supporting facilitator.
Through the use of abstraction, participants will be able to map how making, thinking, and being have mutually influenced each other in their past work. With open guidance, participants will be using the critical theory they’re already engaging with (via literature, interviews, documentaries, etc.) and mediums with which they are already fluent (i.e. clay, code, fiber, sound, etc.). Seen collectively, the group can share with each other the inner workings of what they do to deepen and develop langauge for what they find.
The process includes settling into each other and the space, care practices, preparatory exercises, mapping, map-reading, and soft assessment criteria.
- the artist’s materials
- the critical theoretical texts they engage
- their everyday politicized experience of being in the world
︎︎︎Artist members of the New Museum x NEW INC participate in a workshop in 2017, Matter–Mind Studio co-founded by Lillian Tong, Myriam Diatta, Colleen Doyle | New York City, USThe curriculum runs over a period of 5 consecutive days. Each day is guided with facilitation and studio time. The process is facilitated by Myriam Diatta, Black-Asian independent scholar and former educator at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute. She will facilitate the workshop in partnership with one BIPoC supporting facilitator.
Through the use of abstraction, participants will be able to map how making, thinking, and being have mutually influenced each other in their past work. With open guidance, participants will be using the critical theory they’re already engaging with (via literature, interviews, documentaries, etc.) and mediums with which they are already fluent (i.e. clay, code, fiber, sound, etc.). Seen collectively, the group can share with each other the inner workings of what they do to deepen and develop langauge for what they find.
The process includes settling into each other and the space, care practices, preparatory exercises, mapping, map-reading, and soft assessment criteria.
A moment of protest becomes a curricular object.
...The curricular object that Black Studies became —as a repertoire of critical inquiry— means that my generation of [B]lack scholars and creative intellectuals had to create fields of study and practice, not always with happy results.
—From a speech by Hortense Spillers turned into a 2020 essay titled “A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object” published in A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
eligibility
Participants must meet all 4 criteria.
You identify as a person who is racialised.
You have a conceptual art practice.
You deliberately engage with socio-political concepts at an intermediate or advanced level through your artistic practice.
You’re based in Sweden, Finland, Norway, or Denmark.
You have a conceptual art practice.
This may include, but is not limited to sculpture, performance, music, archiving, sound-based, internet-based, poetry, design, architecture, and more.
You deliberately engage with socio-political concepts at an intermediate or advanced level through your artistic practice.
These concepts may include, but are not limited to ecofeminism, Black critical thought, queerness, geo-political borderlands, abolition, disability, Afropessimism, and more.
You’re based in Sweden, Finland, Norway, or Denmark.
For now, the Centre is only able to accept and cover travel costs for artists who live in and who will be traveling to and from the regions named above.
︎︎︎Images of ‘maps’ hand-made by Myriam Diatta in from doctoral research, Thinking Form: Bringing Together the Everyday and Black Ontoepistemologies, 2022; Monash University | Melbourne, Australia
costs
During its pilot year (2025), travel costs to Aarhus, Denmark are covered by Nordic Otherwise. Artists are provided with a 1500 euro stipend, two group dinners, and accomodation in Aarhus for 6 nights.
Please note: Open calls announced after 2025 may not cover costs.
Please note: Open calls announced after 2025 may not cover costs.
site
Andromeda 8220
Gudrunsvej 78
8220 Aarhus G
Denmark
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background
Approach
︎︎︎ The approach behind the curriculum is based in Black critical thought, performance studies, and design. The Centre’s Director, Myriam Diatta, PhD, designed and established the curriculum in 2021. She first developed the process by investigating the inner workings of her own critical creative practice as a case study. In 2023, Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (Melbourne, AU) nominated the research behind the curriculum for their Doctoral Thesis Excellence award. Read more about the methodology here on Myriam’s website.
Sector and industry
︎︎︎ Contemporary cultural institutions in Nordic countries have increasingly been representing a growing diversity of works by young artists who immerse themselves in critical and racialized perspectives. However, processes specifically to develop the critical artist and the criticality of their work are limited. Nordic Otherwise contributes to filling the gap by running its curriculum.
Art practice
︎︎︎ Emerging artists of color engage deeply with theoretical texts as part of their art practice. For example, American Artist (US) engages with Fred Moten’s book, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition; Dina El Kaisy Friemuth (DK) works with Ariella Asha Azoulay’s book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. For the artist who contends with the socio-political condition, knowing, making, and being are engaged simultaneously. Each mutually influences the others at once. Nordic Otherwise seeks to develop strategies capable of supporting these critical processes.
︎︎︎ The approach behind the curriculum is based in Black critical thought, performance studies, and design. The Centre’s Director, Myriam Diatta, PhD, designed and established the curriculum in 2021. She first developed the process by investigating the inner workings of her own critical creative practice as a case study. In 2023, Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (Melbourne, AU) nominated the research behind the curriculum for their Doctoral Thesis Excellence award. Read more about the methodology here on Myriam’s website.
Sector and industry
︎︎︎ Contemporary cultural institutions in Nordic countries have increasingly been representing a growing diversity of works by young artists who immerse themselves in critical and racialized perspectives. However, processes specifically to develop the critical artist and the criticality of their work are limited. Nordic Otherwise contributes to filling the gap by running its curriculum.
Art practice
︎︎︎ Emerging artists of color engage deeply with theoretical texts as part of their art practice. For example, American Artist (US) engages with Fred Moten’s book, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition; Dina El Kaisy Friemuth (DK) works with Ariella Asha Azoulay’s book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. For the artist who contends with the socio-political condition, knowing, making, and being are engaged simultaneously. Each mutually influences the others at once. Nordic Otherwise seeks to develop strategies capable of supporting these critical processes.
what else?
Check out other must-know schools and courses that focus on critical theory and artistic practice. (The following are not affiliated with Nordic Otherwise).
︎ Accountability Mapping, by Daria Garina, Learn abolition and Transformative Justice skills through the body
︎︎︎Online
︎ Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation, by Torkwase Dyson, an experimental curriculum focused on the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and water
︎︎︎Roving in the US
︎ Reconstructions course, by Marie-Louise Richards at Royal Institute of Art, A course to reimagine spatial practices “otherwise”–learning from Black feminism
︎︎︎Stockholm
︎ School for Poetic Computation, Experimental school for art, code, hardware and critical theory
︎︎︎New York City
︎ WYFY School and graduation, by BUFU, A learning community seeking to love Us well with practice, dreams, & care⠀
︎︎︎New York City
︎ Accountability Mapping, by Daria Garina, Learn abolition and Transformative Justice skills through the body
︎︎︎Online
︎ Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation, by Torkwase Dyson, an experimental curriculum focused on the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and water
︎︎︎Roving in the US
︎ Reconstructions course, by Marie-Louise Richards at Royal Institute of Art, A course to reimagine spatial practices “otherwise”–learning from Black feminism
︎︎︎Stockholm
︎ School for Poetic Computation, Experimental school for art, code, hardware and critical theory
︎︎︎New York City
︎ WYFY School and graduation, by BUFU, A learning community seeking to love Us well with practice, dreams, & care⠀
︎︎︎New York City