Call for Proposals HAMSTER Issue 5
EMBODIMENT // PERFORMANCE // RELATIONSHIPS
The Brief:
Bodies write the body texts of articles, blogs, letters, and the past four issues of HAMSTER Magazine—bodies with histories, shapes, and subjectivities claimed and cast upon them. Issue 5 swerves back around [skrrrt] into the course of past issues to tease out the processes of bodies writing, talking, collaborating, reading, and making relationships across the editorial scaffold.
Standing, extend the left leg, hand on hips, heel to the floor and toe reaching back towards us, we lean into the stretch and dwell on our taut hamstrings—as awkward as this may be, standing in the middle of the office. This room feels different when we flex our bodies like this.
Though often undertaken in seclusion (whether headphones in a public library or a distant woodland hut), reading and writing require relationships.
- To write, we need provocation, most often from other people: friends/artists/strangers/mentors.
- To read, we need others to support our entire wellbeing in order to sit, focus, scroll/turn the pages, and focus, while being privileged enough to extract the required time and space from our laborious schedules for this barely marketable purpose.
- To publish, bodies must come together, writers with editors, co-ordinators with designers, printers, binders, funders, and distributors. In doing this, our ideas might have to change.
Performing myself in email, I introduce ‘me’, appeal to my recipient, maybe attempt a joke? How should I laugh in Gmail? Depends on context I guess. Or copy+paste the template, change the name and location, check, send, repeat. Trying to be your friend is easier when you’re not email 41 of 60 for the afternoon. I can sense your face, hear your body. Did you know that I’m listening to an acid house/psytrance mix while we message?
This embodied experience of relationships can slip through the digits of emails and Google docs, while other habits come to form our practices. How can writers employ the relational processes of devised theatre, dance and other performance practices? What role do texts play within/around artistic and everyday performances? How do digital spaces affect creative relationships? How do our funding bodies and commissioning institutions prioritise certain artistic processes and how do their schedules, spaces, fees, and language collude in this? How do the foundations of these institutions enforce a limited set of legitimate knowledges and how do people engage with alternatives? How do we write together? How can this focus on embodiment and relationships change what/why/how we write?
The Details:
The Physics Room is seeking proposals for Issue 5 of HAMSTER Magazine; a serial publication project that responds to issues in contemporary arts and publishing. Issue 5 will focus on themes of embodiment, performance, and relationships, to offer a space for examining different processes of making and consuming texts as performative, collaborative, or otherwise. This may include poetry, theoretical or critical writing, scripts, diary or documentary style accounts, among other performed/enacted forms of texts and writing.
HAMSTER 5 will house:
- 3 texts responding directly to this brief
- 3 texts and/or pieces of printed ephemera produced from 3 weekend residencies in Ōtautahi where contributors can workshop, draft, generate, and/or perform responses to some aspect of this brief.
The three weekend residencies for individuals or groups of contributors will take place in Ōtautahi. Their focus is the development of works involving texts to be published/performed/enacted as HAMSTER 5. The Physics Room is also glad to be able to cover the travel and accommodation costs of residents in order to improve access to this opportunity. Works that emerge from these residencies can be published and presented serially over the latter six months of 2019 (depending on the project), including being published alongside the three other written texts, to coalesce as the free, print version of Issue 5 by the end of 2019.
Proposals:
RESIDENCY SPACES
To be considered for one of three residency spaces, please outline how the proposed project would make use of:
- A weekend in August, September, or October 2019 in Ōtautahi to collaborate amongst yourselves, the public, and/or members of the HAMSTER editorial group. Please include your preferred weekend dates.
- The opportunity while here to:
- present work(s)
AND/OR
- To produce some printed ephemera
- The opportunity to produce a text-based work for publication in HAMSTER 5 following this residency.
Residency spaces include domestic flights and accommodation covered by The Physics Room, some materials costs while on residency, and a small writing fee for texts published.
NON-RESIDENT TEXTS
To be considered for one of three non-resident, text-based contributions to the magazine, please propose an unpublished project of up to 2500 words—or works of up to 6 A4 pages—which engages with the above brief. We encourage proposals to take risks in experimenting with the form of their text and the process of their writing, and to consider whether the residency, or non-resident text option is most suitable for your project. Full drafts of these texts will be needed by September, and will receive editorial support from the HAMSTER Editorial Group.
Contributors of non-resident texts will receive a $500 fee.
All proposals should consist of one Word or PDF document containing:
- A 500-word (max) project outline.
- Examples of previous work (2-5 pages/images or 1 short video). These should be hyperlinked to or included in the document.
- 300-word (max) bios of each project participant.
- Video Proposals welcome. Max 10 minutes.
Send your proposal file to:
hamster@physicsroom.org.nz
Subject Line:
HAMSTER 5 — Proposal
Proposals are due by:
Midnight, July 7, 2019.
For questions about this call, and to talk further about your proposal please email hamster@physicsroom.org.nz. We are happy to call, kōrero in person, or Skype to discuss working ideas and their suitability for this project at any time before the proposal deadline.
Download a copy of this call for proposals on the right side of this page.