Hangar, in collaboration with BilbaoArte, with the support of AC/E and the participation of Azkuna Zentroa Alhóndiga Bilbao and Leire Vergara, opens a call for applications to award a grant aimed at curators and researchers of Spanish nationality or foreign residents in Spain to carry out a curatorial research residency lasting three and a half months, between November 2026 and March 2027, between Barcelona and Bilbao.
About Encura
Encura is a research residency program that aims to promote, expand, and complexify curatorial research processes, intertwining artistic and territorial contexts, fostering practices that do not necessarily result in conventional exhibition projects.
In its early editions, Encura was led by Hangar in collaboration with hablarenarte and Curators Network. Subsequently, it incorporated La Casa Encendida as a co-leading institution, and later Casa de Velázquez, the CA2M Museum, and hablarenarte, with the support of AC/E, consolidating a work model based on institutional cooperation and situated research between Barcelona and Madrid.
In its ninth edition, the program expands its territorial axis toward Bilbao, incorporating the collaboration of BilbaoArte, Azkuna Zentroa, and Leire Vergara, and reinforcing the situated dimension, mediation, and articulation between contexts.
Objectives of Encura
Since its first edition, Encura has been conceived as a not-necessarily-results-oriented proposal that values research and exchange processes not exclusively focused on the exhibition format as the horizon for materializing curatorial research. Among its objectives is supporting curatorial research and promoting territorial cooperation in the generation and transfer of knowledge and ways of doing through art.
Encura infers curatorial research as a political-affective space that summons its own values, questions, languages, and possibilities. Its porosity and capacity for cross-pollination with other agents and practices, imagining polyphonic narratives and actions, from the theoretical and the sensorial, always in a being-with and doing-with others, also implies an ethical-political methodology in itself, which in turn enables the questioning of ways of making and producing.
As a device for specific and situated curatorial research, Encura is grounded in coexistence, collaboration, dialogue, and interdependence between the Bilbao and Barcelona contexts, proposing to work with investigative methodologies that challenge the hierarchies and logics of privatized and individualized knowledge production.
Encura promotes the transgression of disciplinary boundaries, and decelerated, non-productivist times for exchange and research, enabling the appropriate material conditions for an investigative process to achieve the solidity and degree of experimentation necessary to develop curatorial projects relevant to their contexts and responsive to the questions and urgencies of the moment in which we live and work.
Encura IX Call
Encura IX will allocate a fee of €3,000 and a maintenance allowance of €1,500 to the selected person.
Applicant research projects must be interested in artistic practices rooted in each of the involved contexts, and must contemplate collaboration and dialogue with artists or agents based at Hangar and BilbaoArte.
Encura IX will allocate a budget of up to €2,800 to carry out a public activity in each city involving at least one resident from each center. This grant does not contemplate the possibility of an exhibition outcome. It is an invitation to experiment with other types of activations, socializations, openings, and formats for the project, fitting within the stable programs of the convening institutions, with a research budget of up to €1,000 for related expenses.
What Encura IX offers
In Barcelona:
- Accommodation for the selected person and workspace at Hangar.
- Mentoring, contact, visits with resident artists, and immersion in the local art scene facilitated by Veronica Valentini, responsible for residency and international research programs at Hangar.
- Presentation space for the project in Hangar’s Ricson Room.
In Bilbao:
- Accommodation for the selected person, workspace, contact, and visits with resident artists facilitated by BilbaoArte.
- Mentoring, contact, and immersion in the local art scene facilitated by Leire Vergara as mediator between the candidate and the city’s context.
- Presentation space for the project at Azkuna Zentroa Alhóndiga Bilbao.
Grant provisions
Encura makes available to the beneficiary:
- Fee for the curator: €3,000 gross.
- Maintenance allowance of up to €1,500 gross.
- Research fund for artists, collaborators, and agents participating in the research of up to €1,000 gross.
- Production fund linked to the activation or socialization proposal for the curatorial research developed, of up to €2,800 gross.
- Travel costs between the curator’s habitual place of residence and Barcelona and Bilbao, of up to €500 gross.
- Accommodation and workspace at Hangar, Barcelona.
- Accommodation and workspace at BilbaoArte, Bilbao.
- Mentoring for research, curatorship, and mediation in both contexts.
- Technical support for the development and production of the project at Azkuna Zentroa and Hangar.
Target participants
- The call is addressed to curators and researchers over the age of 18, of Spanish nationality or foreign nationals resident in Spain, at any stage of their professional development.
- Applications may be submitted individually or collectively; in the latter case, a representative of the authors of the curatorial research project must be named.
- The author(s) of the curatorial research project may not participate in it as artists. Those who have received an award in previous Encura calls may not apply, nor may more than one project per researcher be submitted, whether individually or collectively.
- There is no age limit. The project will be assessed in relation to the candidate’s career stage.
Applicants must commit to being available during the months of the residency. - Submitted projects may be part of ongoing research or may be articulated specifically for this purpose.
Calendar and duration
The residency, lasting three and a half months, will take place in stays in Barcelona and Bilbao between November 2026 and February 2027. Specifically, from November 2 to December 18, 2026, in Barcelona, and from January 11 to March 14, 2027, in Bilbao.