Announcement: Final Dissolution & Prompt

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Carissa rodriguez, I’m normal. I have a garden. I’m a person. at front desk apparatus.

The cold hand of Death has taken hold, as we always knew it would, and Dissolve Magazine and our project of quarterly issues must come to an end. As such, we would like to solicit written and creative works based on themes of memory and mourning.

We hope to honor Dissolve Magazine as a project, community, and creative exercise. The collection of works will be immortalized online, and celebrated with a bonfire entombment.

We are accepting proposals for visual and written work (unexpected writing, video works, photo essays etc.) that might address:

  • The impulse to memorialize

  • Funerary practices, the afterlife, the undead

  • The slippage of the present into the historical past, realms of memory

  • Hauntings/to be haunted

  • The figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive

  • Technology as a tool of memory

  • Historiography, institutional archives, conservation

  • Forgetting

These are merely suggestions. Please reach out if you would like to discuss your proposal before the due date, as we are happy to answer any questions you might have and think together with you.

Please email a proposal (text and/or images) to info@dissolvesf.org.

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORS, May 17, 2022: Like most deaths, our magazine’s was sudden. Ultimately, no final issue was assembled, but the spirit of creation-alongside-mourning embodied in this cadaverous prompt continues to chill our bones, haunting much of the work we do in Dissolve’s current iteration, and elsewhere …

Note: Dissolve was on an extended hiatus from 2019-2021 and is pleased to return with renewed vigor, offerings, and a fresh digital patina. Feel free to wander our website, full of Happenings (news), Musings (essays, interviews, and reviews), a Salon (offerings), and Past Issues, some of which we have recollected here. Like the “stone and flesh” of Soviet statuary described in Jyoti Arvey’s piece, we discovered many of our announcements and a few projects that should have been issues had fallen somewhere offscreen at the time they were created. Our sixth and seventh issues come out of this process of restoration.