Deadline: 20 January 2025
Submission email: editorial@hy-phen.space
Hyphen Journal is inviting submissions across a range of formats and from diverse disciplines on the theme of socio-ecological practice. We are looking for contributions that articulate and activate the intersections between the social, ecologies and research-practice in open-ended ways.
As one point of departure for this call, the notion of social practice has been current for some time in artistic production, with reference to approaches that include relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud), dialogic art (Grant Kester) or participatory art (Claire Bishop), among others. In the artistic context, social practice refers to methodologies that extend outwards from the artist’s studio in order to engage with concrete social situations, often seeking to develop forms of long-term involvement with localised communities or places with the aim of addressing existing social problems.
We seek to expand on this several ways: to begin, at the current moment, marked by ever-expanding polycrises and their devastating, unevenly distributed effects, we recognise the need for understanding forms of social practice as always already ecological, and the entanglements that this involves deserve being addressed in their full complexity. This extended mode of investigation also inflects notions of practice as research, which, while being rooted in artistic research-practice in the context of Hyphen Journal, are prone to overflow disciplinary boundaries and coalesce into a multitude of encounters between disparate research methodologies, forms of knowledge production, socio-ecological practices, aesthetics and politics.
At the same time, notions of socio-ecological practice branch out into expansive histories and webs of kinship whose multitudinous threads include Indigenous cosmologies and ethics as articulated, for example, in the words of Davi Kopenawa, Patty Krawec or Georges E. Sioui; the political thought of Murray Bookchin with its emphasis on the inseparability of social and ecological relations in the pursuit of freedom; the many currents of ecofeminist thought and practice that gather in the wake of Fran?oise d’Eaubonne’s originary intervention; the work of artist collectives such as Ogawa Pro who worked across filmmaking and farming, those from the South Korean Minjung art movement who opposed autocratic rule and advocated for political change, or the Argentine Ala Pl?stica’s social assemblages resisting river pollution caused by large-scale development; as well as numerous other practitioners, researchers and thinkers.
In this spirit, we seek propositions that approach research as a creative practice or creative practice as research, whether this takes its cue from artistic, activist, cosmological, philosophical, scientific or other forms of investigation, or indeed any additional fields or transversal movements across these. What we encourage are practices that question existing conventions of representation and their implicit hierarchies, upend ontological or epistemological certainties and closures, and develop thought through expansive modalities that can include encounters with embodied, haptic, sensory, experiential, intersubjective, social or ecological cognition.
This call has been inspired by curator Sunyoung Oh’s project Song of the Wind, an artist residency that took place on the South Korean island Yaksan-myeon in Wando-gun, where kelp farming is the main economic activity, and which sought to activate the social-ecological-practice nexus that this issue of Hyphen Journal is concerned with. A section of the issue will be made up of contributions that specifically relate to Song of the Wind, while the rest of the issue will consist of materials submitted to this open call.
We are calling for experimental, practice-based and theoretical research including, but not limited to, the following:
Guidelines for submission
Media such as video, sound, photography, etc., can be submitted via an online hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, or via online file transfer.
We welcome informal inquiries relating to the special issue or possible contributions. Please direct any inquiries to
editorial@hy-phen.space.
Editor-in-Chief: Matthias Kispert
Guest editors: Sunyoung Oh, Tessa Peters
Editorial collective: Frankie Hines, monika jaeckel, Arne Sj?gren
References
Bag, Sunyoung (ed.) (2019). Revisiting minjung: new perspectives on the cultural history of 1980s South Korea. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Bishop, Claire (2012). Artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso.
Bookchin, Murray (1982). The ecology of freedom: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy. Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books.
Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998). Relational aesthetics. Trans. S. Pleasance and F. Woods with the participation of M. Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du R?el.
d’Eaubonne, Fran?oise (2022). Feminism or death: how the women’s movement can save the planet. Trans. R. Hottell. London: Verso.
Kester, Grant (2011). The one and the many: contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kopenawa, Davi and Bruce Albert (2013). The falling sky: words of a Yanomami shaman. Trans. N. Elliott and A. Dundy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Krawec, P. (2022). Becoming kin: an Indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future. Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books.
Sioui, G.E. (1992). For an Amerindian autohistory: an essay on the foundation of a social ethic. Trans. S. Fischman. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Voelcker, B. (2021). ‘Field work: Ogawa Productions as farmerfilmmakers’. The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 10 (1), 50?71. doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00063_1.
Deadline: 20 January 2025
Submission email: editorial@hy-phen.space
Hyphen Journal, Issue 4, has been inspired by curator Sunyoung Oh’s project Song of the Wind, an artist residency that took place on the South Korean island Yaksan-myeon, Wando-gun, where kelp farming is the main economic activity, the initiative sought to activate the social-ecological-practice nexus with which this issue of Hyphen Journal is concerned. The Song of the Wind section of the issue will be made up of contributions that specifically relate to this project, while the wider issue of the journal invites contributions from diverse disciplines on the theme of socio-ecological practice.
Song of the Wind (2023?2024) was part of a public art initiative conceived as a socially collaborative art project and an anthropological exploration through art, emphasising the interactions and shared experiences within the community where the project was based. It aimed to explore methodologies addressing environmental and social challenges through social participation in art practices, specifically those situated at the intersection of art and ecology. By taking art outside traditional institutions, it created a dialogic, or what Homi Bhabha describes as a “Third Space”, where artists, audiences, and stakeholders could openly discuss different perspectives, including their views on the function of art in contemporary society.
In this project-specific call for papers for Hyphen Journal, Issue 4, relating to Song of the Wind, submissions are invited that relate to the perspectives and questions raised through the experimental method of social engagement put forward by the project. The call invites responses to the project from participating artists and researchers, members of the community who engaged with or experienced the effects of the project, and other observers who have studied the project from a distance, such as curators, scholars, and environmental activists exploring the relationship between ecology, society, and community. In reflection of the main themes of Song of the Wind we particularly welcome project-related submissions relating to:
The call is for experimental, practice-based and theoretical research including, but not limited to, the following:
Guidelines for submission
We welcome informal inquiries relating to the special issue or possible contributions. Please direct any inquiries to
editorial@hy-phen.space.
Editor-in-Chief: Matthias Kispert
Guest editors: Sunyoung Oh, Tessa Peters
Editorial collective: Frankie Hines, monika jaeckel, Arne Sj?gren