Concordia has named the first recipients of the Volt-Age Spark Fellowship, the new research-creation award developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Fine Arts, supporting emerging artists whose work explores electrification, climate transition and broader socio-environmental change.
The inaugural fellows are Alexandre Franchi, MDes 24, and Pauline Batamu Kasiwa Lomami, GrDip Communication Studies 22, MFA Studio Arts 26. Each will receive approximately $50,000 over one year to develop new artistic research while working within Volt-Age, Concordia's electrification research program, funded through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
Franchi will explore how participatory filmmaking and community-based artistic practice can foster new conversations around decarbonized food production and community resilience. For their part, Lomami, will examine the human and environmental dimensions of critical minerals and resource extraction.
Launched earlier this year, the Spark Fellowship supports recent Fine Arts graduates in developing ambitious research-creation projects on the energy transition alongside researchers, students and community partners across the Volt-Age network.
Exploring electrification through artistic research
Franchi sees the Fellowship as an opportunity to expand both his creative practice and his collaborative approach to research.
"Being named an inaugural Spark Fellow marks a turning point in my career: I get to leave the two-dimensional frame of the film screen and craft stories for the three-dimensional exhibition space, around a topic as primal and human as food sovereignty," he says.
"The Fellowship lets me put into practice a method I developed during my Master of Design: creating with a community - through play, ambivalent laughter and ritual - artistic objects that carry new ideas and ways of being. It places that method in direct conversation with decarbonization research, on the community's own terms."
For Lomami, the Fellowship provides a unique setting to investigate the cultural and human dimensions of energy systems.
"More than just technological objects, I see lithium-ion batteries as an infrastructure that connects multiple territories, communities and histories, as well as material for affective and artistic inquiry," they say.
"I am particularly interested in how artistic research can contribute perspectives that complement or complexify technical, scientific and market approaches by addressing cultural, geopolitical, ecological, ethical and affective dimensions of electrification."
Building new connections across art and energy research
Through the Spark Fellowship, artistic research becomes part of the broader conversation on electrification, creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Their projects will not only strengthen Volt-Age's impacts on the just energy transition in Canada, but will also demonstrate that artistic research has the capacity to meaningfully and substantively contribute to scientific research processes and knowledge creation," concludes Alison Bowie, senior research scientist, Engagement, Living Labs and EDI at Volt-Age.
Discover the Spark Fellowship and meet the fellows.
