GOSSIP

C154—Spring 2023

Accepted until: 1 December 2022

What’s your gossip? As unofficial murmurings, gossip speaks to a misaligned oral tradition. Associated with matriarchal and feminist passing of information—think of auntie types gathering across different cultures—gossip is history, unarchived. What is deemed worth noting down and what is to remain as gossip? Through which processes of confirmation do certain belief systems (e.g. the stock market) become legitimized over others as rational, and who decides this? Does some knowledge remain more useful as gossip, sneaking past dominant structures? How does gossip help us protect each other? How does it protect our labour in the contemporary art world?

This issue invites engagements with gossip through artistic practices and creative criticism. Gossip may encompass wishful future-making in the vein of speculative fiction. It may blur what is considered low or high art-making through the spaces that it can inhabit, such as internet/meme culture and mass media. There are the dark sides of gossip, too, and its nebulous anxieties, when it’s wielded to maintain dominance in gendered, racialized, and classed ways. Possible engagements with gossip can include: oral and counter-histories; superstition; secret languages as survival; how information is circulated; parody and humour; art practices focused on sound and listening; privacy, risk, and surveillance. What can gossip tell us about power, and can either exist without the other?

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until December 1, 2022. We suggest pitching early to avoid disappointment. Review pitches, which are not required to be thematic, are accepted on a rolling basis.

Send pitches to pitch@cmagazine.com, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and goes on to indicate the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example).

Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of your CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones written in a style similar to your pitched piece). Submitted work must be original; we do not publish reprints nor adaptations of any kind.

Thank you for understanding that we are unable to reply to unsuccessful pitches.

Please see our submission and writer’s guidelines for more information.

Note: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.