Every six months, contributors will be selected through an open call for proposals, both for written contributions, which can be research based (essays, articles, academic papers) or creative  (poetry, prose), and for artworks (photography, illustration, video, mixed media hybrids). The selected writers will have three months to produce their piece, during which the selected visual artists will work alongside our team to curate the online display of their projects. Artists can submit a completed or ongoing body of work. 

During this time, contributors are encouraged to share relevant resources (such as research material and references, both visual or text-based) through a specially created profile on the platform Are.na.

The collected contributions will result in:

- A six-monthly online publication

- A biennial print publication, collecting the four chapters of issue 01

The research resources, as well as the final publication, will remain available to the public online as open sources.

- Ardesia Projects members: free
- Non-members: 5€ to become a member 

In order to participate to the open call it is necessary to become a member of Ardesia Projects no-profit organisation. The membership is valid for 2023 and allows free access to future calls and benefits. The cost of the membership is 5€. If you are already an associate member of Ardesia Projects, participation to the open call is free of charge.

Selected candidates will be paid 100€ for their contributions. 

ISSUE 01 : About the Body — Through the Body

01.1. Body Politics: Making Subjectivities (take a look at the first issue here )
01.2. Lived Bodies: Affect and Effect (Nov 2022-June 2023) CALL NOW OPEN!
01.3. Other Bodies: Nonhuman Existence (July 2023-Feb 2024)
01.4. Virtual Grounds: Disappearing the Body (Mar 2024-Oct 2024)

We are carried and constituted by an endlessly mutable and responsive organism; a most intimate ally, a sensuous interface to the material world that allows us to touch, hold, caress, hear, taste, smell, and live in connection to each other and our surroundings. If one has the ability to listen, the body is a most reliable sentinel, able to alert and guide us. For the body remembers, with or without conscious memory-work; it soaks up and stores experience, emitting a range of signals, sometimes unintelligible, sometimes in the most unexpected moments. We navigate and occupy space in the world based on its affordances and limits. We endure the trauma it carries, the spasms of grief, the sour betrayal of illness; we are comforted by the intimate pleasures of a caresse, of feeling loved, of being well fed with soup on a winter evening. And, underneath it all, the consciousness of inhabiting a fragile, finite body. As written by Yehuda HaLevi, ‘tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

For the second issue of our biennial theme, we seek written and image-based works that engage with the body as a lived and living organism, an imperfect companion which is always present, always active, always agent in our being-in-the-world, even when we forget about it. How is the body inhabited, what does it have to teach us, how do we exist within it amidst its changes and transformations? Are we or do we have a body? How do bodies coexist and relate to each other, reconciling through intimacy despite their inevitable mutual Otherness? Themes can vary from generational trauma to chronic illness, practices of care and pleasure, intimacy, memory, family histories and so forth. We are looking for embodied practices that center the body in their reflections and metamorphoses.

Keywords:

• Family histories
  
• Trauma (generational and individual)
  
• Illness, disability and the medical body
  
• Body dysmorphia / gender transition
  
• “Abject” bodies
  
• Bodily matters
  
• The psychosomatic body
  
• Biologically regulated bodies
  
• Pleasure and pain
  
• Practices of care
  
• Decolonising the body

All submissions must be sent by February 5th 2023 (23.59 CET), to info@ardesiaprojects.com, email object ANTICAMERA 01.2 NAME SURNAME, through a zip file containing the following:

- Please fill in the following membership form and conclude the subscription through PayPal payment, at the end of the page. Make sure to attach to your submission a screenshot of your PayPal payment!  Click here for the membership form

1. For essays, articles and research based contributions:
- Abstract (max. 300 words) and bibliography, for a max. 2,000 words final piece
- CV including previous publications (if any)

2. For creative writing, prose or poetry:
- Proposal (max 300 words)
- CV including previous publications (if any)

- Pdf with an extract of 5-15 images from the project

- Project statement (250 words max) 

- Videos have to be included with a link for viewing

Submissions that do not adhere to the required submission guidelines will not be taken into consideration.

Download the PDF with the open call info here.

NEW DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: February 5th, 2023 (23.59 CET)
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE: February 15th, 2023
FINAL HAND-IN: May 15th, 2023
PUBLICATION: mid June 2023

For the time being, our budget allows us to select a total of 6 contributors, who will be paid a fee of 100€.