Nathalie Magnan in front of her computer wearing a Victorian mask, Santa Cruz, circa 1980 © Reine Prat.
Nathalie Magnan in front of her computer wearing a Victorian mask, Santa Cruz, circa 1980 © Reine Prat.
ADAGP – Bétonsalon Research and production grant 2025
Call for applications
Bétonsalon and the ADAGP share a common commitment to working closely with artists, promoting visual heritage, and rereading and exploring ignored areas of art history. They have joined forces to offer a research grant program enabling an artist to develop a research project over several months on issues of image representation, production and circulation, based on archival collections.
In 2025, the ADAGP and Bétonsalon are launching a new call for applications for the eighth edition of this grant which is an endowment of €15,000. This grant is intended to cover artist’s fees (€4,000), production costs (€8,000) including travel and accommodation expenses, as well as Bétonsalon’s mentorship fees (€3,000).
This research grant enables artists to undertake the production of new works in a context conducive to experimentation with non-linear models of production and distribution of knowledge between researchers, artists, institutions and the public.
Initiated in 2017 with the Bibliothèque Kandisky, initially around the Marc Vaux collection, then extended in 2022 to the entire photography archives of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the grant will be associated in 2025 with the Archives de la critique d’art, in Rennes.
This 8th edition of the grant is intended to allow an artist to develop a research and production project based on the Nathalie Magnan collection (INHA-Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes).
For this edition, the laureate’s work will be presented in a double exhibition dedicated to the legacy of Nathalie Magnan at the contemporary art center Les Capucins, in Embrun, Hautes-Alpes, and at Bétonsalon, in the second half of 2026.
Les précédent·es lauréat·es sont franck leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018),
Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022), Irma Name (2023) et Florian Fouché (2024).
Artistic committee and selection process
The research and production grant is awarded by an artistic committee of art professionals, who will meet in June 2025.
5 candidates will be shortlisted in April 2025 and invited to develop a preliminary project outlining the scope of the research. These projects will be reviewed and discussed during individual interview with the artistic committee on June 10, 2025. Each shortlisted candidate will be compensated €200 for this preparatory work.
The research period will run through September 2025 to June 2026, and will conclude with a public presentation as part of a group show at Bétonsalon and the contemporary art center Les Capucins, in Embrun, Hautes-Alpes, in the second half of 2026.
How to apply
This call is reserved for French artists: living or working in France for at least 5 years, or of French nationality living abroad.
Candidates must submit an application in French before April 16, 2025, at 2pm.
The application procedure is consultable via this link.
The application file must include the following material:
• A presentation or your artistic practice (300 words max)
• A description of your research project for the grant, specifying your approach to Nathalie Magnan’s work and the type of document identified in the Archives de la critique d’art collection (500 words max)
• A biography (300 words max)
• A CV (2 pages max)
• A portfolio presenting your work (10 pages max)
• An affidavit signed by the artist (document template to download from the online application page)
Schedule:
– Deadline for applications: 16 April 2025 at 2pm
– Shortlist of 5 candidates: April 2025
– Individual interviews: 10 June 2025
– Announcement of the laureate: mid-June 2025
Applications to be submitted online: https://candidatures.adagp.fr/index
For any questions, please contact: info@betonsalon.net.
Nathalie Magnan
Theoretician, director, journalist, webmistress, professor, activist, and navigator, Nathalie Magnan has played a central role in the diffusion of media theory and cyber-feminism in the United States and France since the 1990s. She studied at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester (New York) and at the University of California, Sant Cruz, where she encountered/frequented important theorists in Cultural, Gender and Queer Studies (notably Teresa de Lauretis, Helene Moglen, Jim Clifford and Donna Haraway, whose assistant she later became), she participated in the creation of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, of which she founded the Paris edition in 1994 (now the Paris Chéries-Chéris LGBTQIA & +++ Film Festival), and directed several films with Deep Dish TV, Paper Tiger Television and Canal déchaîné, as well as documentaries with Canal+ (including Lesborama in 1995). She was a professor at several French (Paris 1, Paris 3 and Paris 8) and American universities, then taught at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Dijon before joining Ensa in Bourges in 2007, where she developed a singular collaborative pedagogy influencing a whole generation of artists, researchers and hacktivists. Translator of Donna Haraway’s work in 2002 in Connexions. Art, réseaux, media (re-published in Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais, 2007), she published numerous articles in newspapers, specialized and activist magazines (Libération, Gai Pieds, Les lettres françaises), and (co-)edited several anthologies of texts on the relationship between art and media (La vidéo, entre art et communication, 1997). Member and co-moderator of the Faces and nettime.fr mailing lists, dedicated to gender, technology and arts, Nathalie Magnan has contributed to the emergence and recognition of tactical media communities, such as the Old Boys Network, the first international cyberfeminist alliance, and the Rencontres Zelig cycle.
Her commitment and multi-disciplinary work have unceasingly brought together previously distant fields of research, and created transnational networks and physical and digital spaces of expression designed by and for often marginalized communities and cybercultures. This is borne out by the profusion and diversity of her collection at the Archives de la critique d’art – gathering catalogs (of festivals, cultural events, exhibitions), photocopies of articles, annotated source texts, symposium programs, lecture notes, video scripts, research files, films, research notebooks, activist fanzines, rare diaries, ephemera, correspondence, personal photographs, and even a selection of miniature objects – where the different facets of her life meet and the rhizomes that continue to form around her prolific work emerge.
The files of Nathalie Magnan collection can be consulted on the Calames catalog, which lists the archives held by the Archives de la critique d’art, under the section “Critiques d’art”.
ADAGP – Société française des auteurs des arts visuels and Bétonsalon – center d’art et de recherche (Paris), in partnership with Archives de la critique d’art (Rennes).
Artists in residence at Bétonsalon receive support from the 40mcube art center through the artist for ever training platform.
