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Call for Pitches for Issue 148

Event Details

Date

30 Sep 2020

C148—WINTER/SPRING 2021

Feature and Column Deadline: September 30, 2020
Reviews Deadline: October 10, 2020

In light of the sea changes over the past six months, we’re issuing a rare call for pitches that doesn’t lead with a theme. Rather than trying to cast ourselves into the beginning of next year, and sliding a fully formed concept across the table, we’re opting for a listening process, giving our contributors a chance to tell us what they want to give life to in this time of trenchant irresolution. Below is a set of questions that reflect some of the thinking, conversations, link-sharing, and sparks flying among our editorial team and advisory. We look forward to seeing what a more open-ended prompt culminates in at this unparalleled time of close, careful, and critical examination—of our selves, of our practices, of our relationships, of our environments, of our fields, of our societies.

How does uncertainty (re)model our priorities? How do new demands for plasticity in all our activities fundamentally challenge the idea of planning, of working, of art-making? How has the widespread slackening of the capitalist clock transformed our understandings of what we’re doing and what’s being done to us? How has this enforced chapter of pause allowed us to see the trouble, wealth, and wonder that stirs behind frantic facades? How have recent events forced us to reconsider the ages-old tension between art and politics? Which artistic-activist discursive modes from days past are still relevant, and which no longer serve us? How do we cope with the low-lying, persistent thrum of destruction? What’s hope? What’s doom? What’s giving in, what’s putting up a fight, and what’s it like to oscillate between these states? How are artists digesting, translating, and re-mediating data, hard facts, and statistical information in ways that productively complicate its reception and produce new meanings? Not merely from numbers to what numbers imply, but to the ways our internalizations of such material (re)shape our realities. How do such works externalize, engage, or elide politics? Dovetailing from something the writer, artist, musician, and astrologer Johanna Hedva wrote recently in an essay about the artist Patrick Staff—“Sometimes I think that the history of the world is the history of trying to cope with this thing called the body“—how does the body figure in? Where does the mind go when the body encounters new restrictions? What are some ways to honour the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of those who have prevailed despite the neglectful norms of ableist culture? How are concepts of care, transformative justice, and healing (rife in art speak) actually activated in art communities and institutions (or not)? How are we establishing new protocols with which to deal with conflict in the attempt to stop perpetuating harm? How has mass vulnerability refashioned our ideas about punishment, whether in the justice, medical, or legal systems, or in the art world? In the words of the poet CA Conrad, “what kind of fear stands in the way of love?” Where do we go from here?

Feature, artist project, and column pitches due by September 30. We are also accepting review pitches until Oct 10.

Send pitches to editor@cmagazine.com, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and clearly indicates the submission type (essay, interview, One Thing, Composition, for example) and subject.

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