Letter 4: From 40 applicants to 4 participants. How?
The call for applications and the process for selecting participants for Cycle 1 of the Curriculum Workshop
The call for applications to participate in the Curriculum workshops for Centre for Nordic Otherwise opened in mid-Feb and closed on April 7, 2025. For those of you who applied or are interested in applying in the future, this letter is a great cheat sheet for writing a strong application. For fellow cultural workers, I peel back the curtain on just some of the mechanics behind how I designed an open call and selection process.
In the realm of available courses and residencies, this workshop is small—5 days for 4 participants. That said, I took seriously the time and personal needs folks shared through the application form and designed an open call process that matches the urgency and excitement that folks have expressed for this project. In each email I sent notifying applicants of their decision, I linked this article.
Thank you again to each of you who applied and who spread the word on this new workshop. Here’s what the open call came down to:
40+ applicants total (I was initially crossing my fingers to receive 10 applications!)
5-15 applicants from across Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden
From 9 cities across these four countries
4 selected artists—one from each of the four counties
I didn’t make the typical application form you’d see to apply to a residency program—it focused on the applicants’ process and self-awareness. You can see the questions that applicants responded to here. I asked applicants about things ranging from their level of comfort with uncertainty and past experiences with residencies to asking them to name the materials they use in their practice and their changing relationships to the particular critical theories they engage with.
In this letter, I’ll be breaking down how, in 3 rounds, I narrowed from the 40+ applicants down to 4. I used a rubric with specific criteria for each round.
Round 1: Non-negotiable things — Anonymized — Narrowed to 22 applications
Round 2: The nuts and bolts of an applicant’s practice — Anonymized — Narrowed to 15 applications
Round 3: The portfolio — Narrowed to 8 applications (top 4 and top 8)
Round 1: Non-negotiable things
In Round 1, I anonymize the applications. I do not see applicants ages, photos, backgrounds, social media, or portfolios.
In this application, does this person name their investment in studying their own practice?
The single purpose of the Curriculum is to guide participants in investigating their own practice towards maturing and deepening their political commitments. Everything—from each day to each activity within each day is dedicated to digging into and maturing the inner workings of one’s own practice.The strongest applications named specific aspects of their own practice they hope to study, why it’s important to them, and what they hope to contribute to the group.
There were many applicants only who expressed interest in a network and community. While the Network aims to serve those needs, this is not the aim of the Curriculum workshop.
In this application, does this person show some degree of self-awareness and comfort level in the face of uncertainty?
Because this is the pilot year of the Centre, I’m not only hosting and guiding participants through a process, I’m testing the content and flow of the workshop, too. This means within the 5 day process, there may be unexpected periods of high intensity or gaps that I need to be shake out in preparation for future cycles. It also means that the participants of Cycle 1 should be secure and skillful to some degree in self-regulating their needs as individuals. Future iterations may be able to invite in folks with all degrees of comfort with newness, but the pilot must reduce the number of variables that potentially surround what’s being tested (i.e. testing whether the scaffolded exercises participants do provide the level of deepening and critical experience they intend to and how to pace each day so it’s challenging but comfortable for participants.)In this application, does this person clearly communicate and demonstrate an ability to respond to the prompts?
The Curriculum workshop is full of prompts and guided exercises, so the application form is a great way to get a sense of how skillful someone is in taking a question or topic, expressing themselves, and taking action within the healthy constraints of a prompt.
Round 2: The nuts and bolts of an applicant’s practice
In this next round, applications are still anonymized. I still do not review their portfolios or other content submitted outside of the written portion of the application.
In this application, how committed are they to using criticality and politics in their artistic practice?
The process and activities of the workshop require participants to engage with critical concepts at an intermediate to advanced degree. For the purposes of this application, this means that of the critical theory they read, watch, listen to, they demonstrate that they use it in their practice—not only as themes in their creative practice, but in formal study, at home, with elders, friends, neighbors, etc.Are any of the materials the participant works with in their practice feasible to use and adapt for the Curriculum workshop?
To investigate the inner workings of their own practice, participants will use a medium in which they’re already fluent—be it their body, coding, or writing. They’ll take that fluency with this medium they usually use to negotiate concepts and create works of art, design, sound, architecture, etc., and instead learn (on Day 1 and 2 of the workshop) to repurpose this fluency towards critical self-reflection. This requires the mediums to have the potential to be used to sketch with, be flexible, and low-stakes to work with.
Round 3: The portfolio
Are they able to communicate their practice effectively?
A strong creative practitioner not only does their work, but is able to let others make meaning of their work. This might look like a well crafted series of sentences in a portfolio, or it might be accomplished through the things of their practice itself. As critical creative practitioners, we study, self-reflect, and work towards knowing ourselves so that we can express what we know with clarity when we come across or are in collaboration with others. Generosity.
Do I connect and care to invest in supporting this person’s practice?
The political is personal, the pedagogical is personal. I’m taking a process I developed over more than 10 years in different contexts outside of the Nordic region and for professionals in different fields. There’s so much inextricable ‘personal’-ness in that. I’m bringing it to each of the 4 participants of the Curriculum workshop. Honestly, I realize it’s important to me—in addition to the other criteria—that I want to work with the critical concepts and mediums each participant brings with them. That’s whether their concepts and mediums are familiar to me, challenge me, or have the potential to encourage something interesting between participants. Importantly, this criteria is the final factor after a broader review process.
Tips
Use the task of creating a rubric as an iterative, generative exercise to show yourselves and/or your team what you’re looking for. Work on it over a period of weeks, developing it over time. The application questions should easily tie back to the criteria in the rubric.
Be intentional about the barrier to entry to apply. What portions of the application do you want folks to spend time on? What forms of content do you want them to be able to easily share or draw from past applications? In this case, I kept the portfolio a low-hanging fruit, making sure applicants could share an existing portfolio as-is, and in any format. And I intentionally made the most important criteria points about self-awareness and criticality be pointed and unexpected questions that ask the participant to stop and think.
Keep track of your timeline (I like to stay old school and use a spreadsheet) and keep notes on what felt rushed, just right, or too drawn out and adjust it for next time. Accurately scoping timelines is one of my weird flexes :^)
What’s next?
For Nordic Otherwise, the focus is on onboarding the 4 selected participants, preparing materials (designing, printing out, etc.) for the 5 days in July, and preparing the physical space in late June.
For the newsletter, stay tuned for more on the lovely Workshop Coordinator, Yasmin, launching the Network in August, an essay on running An Introvert’s Cultural Initiative, and much more.