Final Dissolution - Prompt
The cold hand of Death has taken hold, as we always knew it would, and Dissolve must come to an end. As such, we would like to create a final issue based on themes of memory and mourning.
We hope this issue will honor Dissolve 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.
The Bureau of Longitudes
The Bureau of Longitudes is a new office of Dissolve: a site for archiving accounts of place in various languages, organized by each topic’s degrees of longitude. Working with editors based in San Francisco and Mexico City, the Bureau is interested in alternative approaches to cartography and place-making (i.e. affective, nonvisual, Marxist, feminist, queer). In this cyclical ‘catalogue’ of the globe’s east-west divisions, contributions may address the absurdist logic of globally-organized space; the dissonance of time zone-based distinctions; materiality and (im)permanence in landscapes and other spaces; and the quixotic and overlapping modalities through which we see, understand, and experience the imaginaries of place, from its fantasies to its realities. The Bureau is developing an online archive to support the findings of the project. This site will itself become a collective experience.
The Bureau of Longitudes is an administrative office of Dissolve Magazine, supporting its endeavors in the field of cartographic imaginations. Its terrain is being imagined by editors Susana Eslava, Carolina Magis Weinberg, and Christopher Squier and reopens the case for investigations of cartography taken up by Dissolve’s August 2017 project, Mapping the Unmappable/Mapeando lo Intrazable.
Contributions may take various forms, including the video essay, visual essay, and written essay. Submissions should include a brief description of no more than 500 words, which addresses the contribution’s intended format, topic, and systematic approach. At the current time, there is no stipend for contributions.
Video samples will be accepted in Vimeo and Youtube links. Writing samples can be submitted as Word documents or through Google Drive. If you have an idea that falls outside these parameters, please describe in detail or start a conversation with us. In general, we discourage finished work in the initial proposal and enjoy developing ideas in conversation with you. However, if a particular past work seems to fit the project, we would love the chance to review it. Please include a brief description of how the piece addresses the project’s questions or investigations and if you are willing to adapt it. Submissions for the first phase of the project will be accepted at info@dissolvesf.org through Sunday, February 11.
See https://www.bureauoflongitudes.org/ for more information.
Call and Respond (S'il Vous Plaît)
We are accepting on a rolling basis written and visual responses to posted image(s) on the homepage. A rotating selection of Call and R(SVP) images will be posted periodically. All previous calls will be accessible in our archive of visual prompts, the Echo Chamber. Responses may engage with art history and theory, visual culture, current events, or any variety of other disciplines.
Email info@dissolvesf.org to submit, or if you would like more information. Max 1500 words.
