Inflexions No. 9: F(r)ictions* (July 2016)
Curation and Editing by Hubert Gendron-Blais, Diego Gil, Joel E. Mason
Design by Leslie Plumb
* please view on a computer, to experience the interactive version of this issue. A simplified version has be created for mobile devices.
Original Call for F(R)ICTIONS
A call for works of art and/or philosophy that feel (or exist at) the friction point of two urgencies: the need for immediate macro-material, perceptible, collective political change (as exhibited in student strike activism in Quebec, Black Lives Matter in the U.S., Blackfulla in Australia, and Idle No More in Canada, among many others) and the need for micro-material, processual, and often imperceptible anarchic tendings of an already swarming political affect, a coming together beneath recognized political forms (as developed most recently by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons and less recently in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus). Submissions do not have to be limited to the examples above but can touch on any events in which the corporeality of the political is felt and put into question towards a further reshaping of its form. We understand “frictions” as the manners of grasping the concretization of a political struggle and “fictions” as their aesthetic and theoretic propositions that overspill towards the more-than-concrete, diagramming alternative trajectories of thought and feeling.
An ecology of practices is needed in order to grasp the multiple contrastive f(r)ictions surrounded by and surrounding the political in this issue. Text is sometimes able to touch the “more than” of a struggle on its own, but here other modes are needed as well. Therefore we are calling for compositions expressed by any one or all of the following modes: text, movement (video), movement (still image), and sound. Special interest will be invested in those submissions that incorporate more than one mode (written texts submitted as sound recordings, for instance). Those submitting in single modes (like text) could dialogue with the editors about the possibility to have their piece woven into the issue with other submitted modes.
By composing with an ecology of practices, our intuition tells us that there may be a different grasping from the studied political struggle: a singular traction bordering the scales of micro and macro political attention that is instigated by the imaginable stitches of text, sound, and image. The potential of such a traction is in its transversal grasp, further thinking and feeling the surrounded political experience in reference to the different alternatives for life existences to come.
Image from our Launch: