[Commlist] Call for Contributions - Mimesis Magazine

The second issue of /Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine/ turns to 
practices of recycling, salvaging, replicating, appropriating, 
reappropriating, regurgitating, and remediating, as they are used in 
film and performance works that examine environmental, epistemological, 
historical, and socio-political structures as if they are notional 
spolia: fragments to plunder, retrieve, critique, and refashion.

As artists, we enter our present submerged in the lasting effects of 
colonialism, awash in global capitalism’s exploitation of the planet and 
its intensifying socio-economic inequalities. Objects as well as 
subjects under the sign of capitalism are not inherently or contextually 
valued and are often despoiled as cheap resources for their base 
monetary value. We are called by an imperative to reclaim what has been 
stolen from us, while remaining painfully aware that what we rescue 
might be spoiled to the core. We wish to invite you to think with us: 
how can we be the ones to spoil the power structures that we inevitably 
inherit in our artistic practices? How can we meaningfully foreground 
the potentials that these notional spolia—these pillaged and retrieved 
structures, modes, or consciousnesses—may bring to artistic 
temporalities? Here come to mind Baghdad being built from the bricks of 
Ctesiphon, hip-hop sampling and John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, or the 
disparate cultural objects that are contained in the syncretic altars of 
Santería.

The recent emergence of AI-generated images exemplifies a mode of 
production that regurgitates already existing cultural tropes and their 
biases. Such modes seem to reject that anything radically new could be 
imagined to reconceptualize our societies, or could emerge to 
differently activate our planetary habitation. How might our films and 
performances reroute our energies and help restructure what we use? How 
to acknowledge that when our films and performances salvage what is 
“discarded” as waste, or when we create to reclaim our liberty, we might 
in effect be continuing to silence the past, be further draining 
resources, and be disempowering in our effort to empower?

With /Mimesis/ issue #2, we propose to assemble visions, gestures, and 
new social, ecological, and epistemic relations within film and 
performance practices. We are looking for “spoilers” of cinematic forms 
and narratives that expose their oppressive histories. We are interested 
in artistic practices that plunder and spoil the extractivist structures 
that lie in the stolen building blocks that our histories are made of, 
in practices that turn value into waste and refuse to reuse as they 
recycle, appropriate, and reclaim. Let’s spoil!

~

Our call is aimed at artists, practitioners, and theorists to contribute 
texts — as well as other media that can exist online — that engage with 
the terrain and topic of film and performance. By film and performance, 
we mean to include, but are not limited to, mediated performance, 
recorded performance, performance for representation, performance in 
cinema, and cinema as performance. We are excited to engage in all ways 
to think about the overlap and convergence of moving images and 
performative practice.

We invite you to send us a proposal, an abstract, or a finished draft 
for our consideration. Published essays will typically range from 
2,500-5,000 words. We are also open to various audiovisual and 
web-inhabiting formats, poems, and fiction. Please add a short cover 
letter to help contextualize the proposal along with a CV and up to 
three writing samples. Send your materials to (info /at/ mimesismagazine.com) 
<mailto:(info /at/ mimesismagazine.com)> by November 30, 2023.




Published works will receive a small honorarium.


No payment is required from the authors




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