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CFP: Gardening

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Deadline: Sat, August 31st, 2024

Gardens can be deeply comforting, unsettling, joyous, or solemn. Spaces of leisure, sustenance, play, and remembrance, their apparent naturalness inevitably belies deep ideological roots. Even the most simple-looking garden is the result of specific tastes and choices that often emerge from unpredictable entwinements of colonial cultural matrixes as well as local traditions or personal histories.

Gardens are always and inescapably steeped in narrative. Their silence tells stories about us, plants, and the land. Sometimes burdened with the impossible task of representing the whole world; at others, they are someone’s vegetal self-portrait. But unlike most portraits or self-portraits, gardens are never still. They elude our desire to immortalize and preserve. As such, from an artistic perspective, gardens are not akin to landscape paintings. They are much more intimately related to installation and performance art. They entail action, agency, exploration, and movement.

In time, gardens have slowly become geopolitical micro-sites in which we play out our desires, fears, anxieties, and dreams. Negotiations, eradications, fostering, and pruning—gardens are about controlling and letting go, writing and erasing, growing and decaying, fullness and loss. Yet, despite being fundamentally curated and arranged relational spaces, they can still foster collective growth and are indispensable sites for nurturing hope.

This issue of Antennae focuses on gardening as an expanded and generative praxis that can take form through a range of media and spaces. Most importantly, it aims to build upon and move beyond the substantial contribution of post-colonial critique to the subject to map new ideas, approaches, and conceptions that can acknowledge our fraught past and foster new dimensions of responsibility and empathy.

We invite original, accessible, and engaging submissions from artists, scholars, curators, and practitioners of all kinds.

Please send a 250 word abstract outlining your proposed contribution and up to three images to Giovanni Aloi (Editor and Founder of Antennae at antennaeproject@gmail.com) by August 31st 2024. Acceptance notices: September 15th.

Final submissions by February 1st, 2025. ‘Gardening’ will be published in July 2025. Academic essays = length 4000 words max (accompanied by 10 images max)
Artists’ portfolio = 10 images along with 1000 words max statement/commentary    Interviews = maximum length 5000 words
Fiction = maximum length 5000 words
Roundtable discussions = 4000 words

www.antennae.org.uk

Posted on Mon, August 5th, 2024
Expires on Sat, August 31st, 2024

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