Editors - Ram Krishna RanjanJyoti Mistry
This issue of PARSE Journal emerges from a curiosity to deepen an understanding of the affordances of fabulation across a range of artistic practices, tracing convergences and divergences, dilemmas and possibilities, approaches and methods. Its contributions were shaped in part by a two-day, in-person workshop held in Gothenburg in early 2024, brought together through an Open Call, with many of the participants eventually contributing to the pages that follow.
Rather than treating fabulation as a settled concept or singular method, the contributions approach it as a site of experimentation, exploration and contestation, as a mode of engaging with absence, opacity and silenced histories, while remaining attentive to the responsibilities such engagements entail. It is invested in teasing out the situated, ethical and methodological dilemmas that emerge when fabulation is practised, and attempts to think conscientiously about what fabulation makes possible, what it risks and what it demands of those who mobilise it in the pursuit of knowledge, memory and justice and, perhaps most crucially, in dwelling in other possibilities.