PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden) is an online international artistic research publishing platform based in The Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. PARSE publishes open access research and organises events which facilitate dialogue, publication and open peer review. Our multidisciplinary content aims to address academics, artists and art audiences who are curious about the contribution of research to the arts, and the contribution of the arts to knowledge-making. As an exclusively digital platform, our purpose is to foster, publish and archive research across international contexts. PARSE aims for an openness towards content and format and provides resources to experiment with these in the editorial process. PARSE is run by a small working group who work with a variety of external editors.
PARSE has opened a new call for contributions on the theme: cleaning. All contributions will undergo an open peer review process for publication.
Call closes: 01 November 2026
Contributors will be notified by 10 December 2026
Here is the link to our online submission form.
Please submit:
- An abstract (300-400 words)
- A bio (150 words)
- A description of the format and how it supports your idea. (300 words)
In 2024, nibia pastrana santiago turned the Mead Art Museum’s freight elevator into a stage. Dressed in bright shorts, a sheer tank top and sunglasses she cleaned. Or rather: she performed cleaning. She engaged objects in a sequence of erratic, deliberately lazy, gestures. No task was completed. Her actions refused resolution, suspending cleaning between labor and choreography, function and excess.
Guest editors Ludmila Ferrari and Lisa Crossman invite interdisciplinary contributions that take pastrana’s gesture as provocation: what does it mean to touch everything and finish nothing? Cleaning involves touch and repetition, but to what end? How does cleaning exceed maintenance?
Cleaning operates simultaneously as a material task, meditative practice, and political metaphor. To clean is to sustain, but also to erase. The same gesture that preserves can expunge; the same logic that orders can eliminate. This applies to domestic labor and institutional maintenance, curatorial and editorial hygiene, ecological repair and territorial erasure.
We welcome a variety of formats with a special interest in those that play with the topic of cleaning. A cleaning manual as critical text? A conversation between a janitor and an art historian? A manifesto, visual and audiovisual texts, performance scripts? We are as interested in the shape of an argument as its content.
The issue will be released in Fall 2027, followed by a convening in San Juan, Puerto Rico — a place where the politics of cleaning are lived with particular acuity. Colonial maintenance, the long labor of hurricane aftermaths, and the everyday work of communities caring for what institutions abandon: these are not background to our theme but a continuation of it. The convening extends the editorial practice into the territory the issue thinks with.
Publication and participation in the convening are not contingent on one another, though we anticipate inviting all contributors to attend. Organizers intend to make the event hybrid, honoring the importance of in-person connection while recognizing the reality of a diasporic world enhanced through online ties.
An honorarium will be provided to contributors to the special issue and to participants in the convening. However, PARSE is unable to support travel to Puerto Rico.
Proposals are accepted by this google form link only. Deadline Sunday 01 November 2026. Proposals sent via other means, including email or social media, will not be considered. If you have not been notified by 10th December 2026, you can assume your proposal has not been accepted. Unfortunately, we do not have the capacity to offer feedback on those proposals not accepted.
Please address any enquiries to parse@konst.gu.se
We look forward to reading your proposals!
PARSE supports a range of audio-visual and textual formats. Guidelines for future contributors to PARSE journal can be found here
Please share this call in your networks.