Call for Papers — Counteract: practices of artistic resistance, dissidence and furtivity
Deadline: June 15th 2025.
Guest Editors: Verónica Metello, PhD (Faculty of Letters – Coimbra University) and Prof. André Rangel, PhD (Faculty of Fine Arts – Porto University)
Posted of the documentary My Name is Janez Janša (2012) by Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša. Image courtesy of: Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
We appeal to those who are the operators of dissident practices, to those who use dominant modes to affirm them as divergent, to those who resort to the common to unfold it in the singular, to those who incorporate and underline repetition to reveal it with the difference.
We call for the submission of essays that explore practices in the scope of performance art and theory, of new media and autonomous and alternative media that operate and focus on the creative power of dissident, resistant and furtive modes in shaping the world in the face of power and normativity.
In the post-digital Anthropocene in which we live, statistical probability and the economies of data and attention shape the emerging contemporary condition in which we live – a global, computational digital ecosystem updated by calculation – from ecology to society. In this reality subjugated to algorithmic bias and data dictatorship – which, as Meghna Jayanth states, “robs us of agency, time, self-esteem, connection and fosters addiction, dependence, hatred, fear, insecurity and even social and interpersonal violence” (Jayanth, 2021, as cited in Spies, 2024) – new “luddites” are needed: who, in an attitude of Marcusian “great refusal”[1] are capable of reconfiguring the relationship with the instruments of calculation, surveillance, governance and arbitration of truth, using them as instruments of expression and emancipation.
In this present, of simultaneous temporalities in overlapping and repetitive iterative rhythms, we call on those involved in radical artistic and scientific practices and in cultural subversion to submit their contributions to this issue of JSTA.
As Achille Mbembe points out and Jonathan Crary describes, the current landscape of experience, in a world governed by the experience economy, operates in the tension between the living and the machines (Mbembe, 2021; Crary, 2022). What Mbembe called brutalism [2] affects the entire set of fundamental relationships between human beings and the world. Furthermore, in a movement of assimilation, technology and its coincidence with media in the structuring spheres of life has become central, reconfiguring the “psychogeography” [3] of encounters, modes of presence, the articulation of subjectivity, mobilization and social emancipation. The social, the artistic and the political, digitally transmediated and mobilized by information capital (Sierra Caballero & Sola-Morales, 2021), is thus configured in a hyper-controlled network of relations (Stiegler, 2016) in which the capacity to create the conditions and the experiences of dissidence is formatted, conditioned and blocked by the means themselves (Crary, 2022).
At the intersection of art and politics, artivism conjures up dissident and furtive, powerful and political articulations, operating in a fluid and extensive space that makes minorities visible, imposing deviations, shaping subjectivities, empowering and creating alternatives. Dissidence, as José Miranda Justo shows, more than having a fundamentally discursive characteristic, is, above all things – political (Justo, 2021), operating with experimentation and the exploration of difference, evolving from a decentralized or minority perspective, in the face of dominant modes and forms of thought and action.
Artivism, Paulo Raposo defines, results from a porosity between art and politics, designing a plane of inscription where the imagination of alternatives and a consequent intervention in the world converge (Raposo, 2015 as cited in Raposo 2023). In this regard, also the autonomous or alternative media operate as powerful vehicles of dissent and stealth, subverting the social order through appropriation, liberating the media and public space from the private domain. Autonomous media are defined by their openness – in terms of content and accession – and their goal is to amplify the voices of groups and individuals who do not normally have access to the media, involving them in the production and dissemination of contents (Langlois, & Dubois, 2005).
The furtive mode acts as a denormalization, designing strategies and modes of affirmation that are estranged to the exercise of power and norm, operating through a destabilization and reconfiguration of the relations and articulations of the conceptual, the sensitive and the aesthetic in experience. Cynthia Fleury and Antoine Fenoglio propose this concept as a formalization of a way of exfiltrating oneself from reality, creating alternative ways of inhabiting it (Fleury & Fenoglio, 2022).
Given the urgency and the above coordinates, we intend to highlight the magmatic and political power of counteracting, bringing to the discussion and making visible exploratory, dissident, furtive and resistant theoretical and artistic practices in the scope of performance art, new media and autonomous alternative media, in a broad field that crosses:
Aesthetics
Archives, memory and resistance
Art and Experimentation
Art and New MediaArtivism
Communication – digital media, alternative media and nano-media as artistic means of dissent and resistance
Cybernetics
Data economy
Digital humanities
Divergent identities and exploratory subjectivities
Epistemic disobedience
Emergence
Experience and experimentation
Heterotopia
Ontology, identity and technology
Philosophy and anarchism
Political aesthetics
Political philosophy
Politics and ethics of care, Politics of reparation
Resistance, dissent and furtiveness
Studies of Experience