Let’s spoil! - open call
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!
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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. You are also encouraged to add a CV/bio and up to three writing samples. Send your materials to info@mimesismagazine.com by November 30, 2023.
