Sound art open calls usually sort by medium: send us your compositions, your installations, your field recordings. Banff Centre’s 2027 thematic residency sorts by argument instead, and the argument is unusually specific.
Sounding Like a Mountain invites visual artists with projects that consider how places sing, how memory persists in vibration, and how listening to the land can re-orient ethical and political relations.
The details
- Deadline: 18 November 2026
- Programme dates: 17 May – 18 June 2027 (five weeks)
- Location: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada — in person
- Faculty: Brendan Fernandes (artist; USA/Canada), Claire Fleming Staples (artist; USA), Abril Zales (curator; Mexico)
The premise
The residency draws on acoustic ecology — the study of the relationship between living things and their sonic environment — and takes the mountains of Banff as the subject and the instrument.
Participants are invited to explore how sound activates multiple temporalities, shaped by land use, migration, ecological disruption and colonial infrastructures.
That framing is doing real work. Acoustic ecology can easily become a pastoral exercise: go somewhere beautiful, record it, present it as unspoiled. Naming land use, migration and colonial infrastructure as the forces shaping what a place sounds like refuses that. A mountain’s soundscape includes the railway, the highway, the tourism, and the removals that made the park possible. Listening carefully is a political act before it’s an aesthetic one — and in Banff, a national park with a long history of Indigenous displacement, that’s not an abstract point.
Who should apply
The call is under visual arts, not music, and that’s deliberate. This is for artists whose practice involves sound but isn’t necessarily composition — installation, video, performance, sculpture, research-led work, walking practice.
Strong fits:
- Field recording and listening practices with a research or political dimension
- Installation where sound is structural rather than accompaniment
- Anything on land, extraction, infrastructure or ecological change looking for a sonic method
- Performance and choreography attentive to vibration and place — the presence of Brendan Fernandes, whose work sits between dance and visual art, points that way
Less suited: a purely studio-based music project. Banff has separate music residencies for that, including an Independent Residency in music with an October 14 deadline.
Practical notes
Banff Centre is a serious, well-resourced institution with facilities across disciplines, and its residencies are competitive. Programme fees and financial aid vary by residency and are listed per programme — check the specific fee structure and aid options on the programme page before applying, since Banff’s residencies are generally fee-bearing with need-based support available, and the amounts differ.
Five weeks is a long residency. That’s long enough to actually work somewhere rather than visit it, which for a place-based listening project is the whole point — the first fortnight of field recording anywhere is mostly learning what you’re hearing.
The 18 November deadline gives nearly eight weeks, which is enough time to write a proposal properly. For a thematic call this specific, a proposal that engages the theme rather than repackaging an existing project will be doing the obvious right thing.