Call out for un Magazine is now open.
Call for proposals – un Magazine 19.2: We swear we saw this. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds guest edited by Azza Zein
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Proposals are due by midnight AEDT – 21 April 2025. Late or incomplete submissions may not be considered.
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un Projects is excited to announce our second 2025 call out for contributions to un Magazine…
un Magazine 19.2: We swear we saw this. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds
ed. Azza Zein
un Magazine 19.2 We swear we saw this explores the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks. The theme of the issue adapts titles from Michael Taussig’s book and Adrian Piper’s work.[1]
The anthropologist Michael Taussig expands on how drawing, as a non-verbal record, is ‘naked witnessing’.[2] He highlights the role of chance in fieldwork notebooks and compares this chance to Marcel Proust’s ‘mémoire involontaire’.[3] For Taussig, drawing becomes play, and text becomes work. Would the writer Orhan Pamuk agree? Aren’t Pamuk’s newly published notebook pages wanderings and play in words, colours and scribbles?[4] Should we search for the chaotic and ‘nomadic’ Rousseau-like confessions in annotated scrapbooks? Can the involuntary connections that happen with juxtapositions of archival images and fictional text bring a temporal disconnect and subvert homogeneous narratives of wars and peace like in the artist Walid Raad’s Atlas series?[5] Or should we consider the notebook as a site of refusal as the painter Lee Lozano’s pages have been read? Can notebooks reveal genealogies of resistance in the immediacy of notetaking and the urgency in documenting what is witnessed, such as in conflict zones?[6] The list goes on and you can fill a whole notebook. As the poet Adrienne Rich states, can we ‘reopen these notebooks with an image befitting the long, erotic, unended wrestling of poetry and politics?’[7]
un Projects invites artists, curators and writers to reflect on the notebook. Is it a witness? Is the notebook a protagonist? Is it a site of translation? Is it a mapping device? We call on artists to discuss the value of artistic notebooks in all forms; field notes, scrapbooks, digital notes, seriality of maps demarcating psycho-geographies, and the relationship between a text and an image.
Bring in your ethnographic methods, auto-ethnography, anti-ethnography, archives and counter-archives, fictional approaches and creative engagement with the notebook.
We are looking for various forms of writing and artistic pages that critically engage with such materials as notes, marginalia, in their relationship with drawings as well as their capacity to demarcate time, (counter-)geographies and otherwise unpublished notes and drawings.