NEW PRIMARIES: critical foundations for practice-based research
Francisco-Fernando Granados, stop pretending this is a child’s adventure (2025). Photo: James Knott.
NEW PRIMARIES: critical foundations for practice-based research
The Creative School Catalyst Summer Institute 2025, facilitated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
The inaugural Creative School Catalyst Summer Institute, facilitated by artist and MDI PhD candidate Francisco-Fernando Granados, takes place August 12 to 14, 2025. Titled NEW PRIMARIES: critical foundations for practice-based research, the Institute proposes drawing, reading, and writing as a set of foundational elements for research creation. This pedagogical and discursive framework emerges from Granados’ work in the context of The Creative School’s Media & Design Innovation (opens in new window) program and seeks participation from graduate students, undergraduates considering a masters degree, and professionals in the visual arts and cultural production with an interest in critical approaches in aesthetic practice.
NEW PRIMARIES uses a studio/seminar format to explore overlaps and resonances between drawing, reading, and writing as methods that emerge through integrated practices of observation, composition, and making-marking. Using participatory reading as a foundation, we will spend the first half of each day engaging with key thinkers in the fields of critical theory and art writing, dialoguing both with the text as well as with fellow workshop attendees. Participatory reading treats the text as a point of departure for discourse, annotating and engaging with ideas as we discuss. From this process, we develop strategies that use drawing and writing as relational strategies capable of inscribing back into the text and extending the discourse. This emerging interdisciplinary method helps build the foundations of critical thinking in practice-based research. In the second half of each day, we will discuss a variety of works by contemporary visual artists as case studies that embody critical approaches to practice-based research.
Schedule + Themes
August 12th: Reading as Expanded Field:
How to treat reading as a dialogue with a recent and distant past that allows you to understand not just what the writing might be saying, but that the authors intend to do within a larger conversation.
August 13th: Writing as Inscription:
How to approach writing as a way to speak back to those larger conversations and carefully craft your own argument, creating connections between other thinkers as you find your own voice.
August 14th: Drawing as Method:
How to practice drawing as a way to understand the world around us through the combination of observation, composition, and mark making; opening up to the idea that drawing is something that happens beyond a piece of paper
About the Artist
Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced a movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, enacting abstraction site-specifically and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, the study of queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in Coast Salish Territories. This layering of experiences trained his intuitions to seek context-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.
Key practice-based projects include ‘who claims abstraction?’ (2023-24) a solo exhibition and artist book produced with SFU Galleries (Vancouver BC); ‘foreward’ (2021-23), a series of site specific installations in dialogue with the permanent collection at The MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie ON); ‘co-respond-dance Version II’ (2020), an artist book published in collaboration with Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montreal QC); ‘duet’ (2019-20) a traveling two-person exhibition alongside Canadian modernist painter Jack Bush in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Peterborough and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (ON); and ‘refugee reconnaissance’ (2021), a bilingual compilation of performance scores spanning 2005-2013 exhibited at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau QC). Other highlights include participation in international group shows on contemporary queer aesthetics at the Hessel Museum (2015) and Ramapo College (2016) in the United States and Malmö Konstmuseum (2022) in Sweden. In the past year, Granados has participated in two group exhibitions: ‘Diasporic Affections’ at SBC gallery of contemporary art in Montreal and ‘Fortitude/Fragile’ at OCAD University’s OnSite Gallery.
Recent publications include chapters for books including ‘Forced Migration in/to Canada: From Colonization to Refugee Resettlement,’ ‘Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada,’ and an upcoming essay for ‘Diffracting the North Contemporary Latinx Canadian Experiences and Practices in Film, New Media, and Visual Arts.’ Granados has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, and the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and has taught art and theory in various capacities at OCAD University and University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2022, Granados began a PhD in Media & Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.