CALL FOR PITCHES + SUBMISSIONS
Issue 03: (un/in)scripted
“Was the Palestinian revolution really written on the void, an artifice superimposed on nothingness, and is the white page, and every little blank space between the words, more real than the black characters themselves?” Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
The Vermin is returning for its third issue! We’re looking for work that explores the theme “(un/in)scripted.”
Inscription is the marking and cutting of a material surface toward the production of meaning or signification which can include writing, printing, casting reliefs, cutting or burning, circumcision, and other bodily modifications. In our moment of being inundated by documentation of catastrophe, we are also paradoxically facing a moment of people, places, and things being erased from the public record. Yet the absence of a mark might also be an inscription: how might we trace silences, erasures and excisions, trauma, spaces between words? (Un/in)scripted is a politically urgent invitation toward questioning both the marked and unmarked surface – that which has been written, that which has been left unsaid, or that which has been written only through its non-writing.
(Un/in)scription is a forum for questioning publishing within a publication – a self-reflexive terrain to examine what we are both doing and not doing when we write, print, and disseminate. We are interested in the theme of inscription both literally (e.g., writing, printing, mediality and materiality such as paper or celluloid film, photographic contact, cutting performances and book arts) but also conceptually (e.g., requiems or glorifications of media and counter media, trauma and the unassimilable and uninscribed, the inscriptions of absence, and more). Inscription is the moment that the concrete and the abstract; the psychic and the corporeal; the literal and figurative, meet and produce one another.