Fabulation Open Call

The university’s platform for artistic research PARSE has opened a new call for contributions of research on the theme: Fabulation.

All contributions will pass through an open peer review process.

The deadline for submission of abstracts/proposals is 20 November 2024.

Selected proposals will be notified no later than the end of January 2025. Those selected will be expected to participate in a two-day, in-person workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, scheduled for March or April 2025. Between the announcement of the shortlist and the workshop, participants will refine and further develop their submissions. The workshop will offer an opportunity for collaborative exploration of the overarching theme. Participants are expected to present a complete working draft of their contribution for discussion and feedback on their submissions.

The deadline for the full draft after the workshop is 5 May 2025.

The PARSE Summer 2025 issue Fabulation will explore and interrogate the affordances of mobilising fabulation in artistic practices.

A multitude of definitions for fabulation exist. Abram (1999) speaks about fabulation in terms of “experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic” (p.196). For Piérola (2022) fabulation is about straddling “history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories”. In common parlance, the term refers to creating or telling fables to convey a moral lesson. However, in the last two to three decades, this term has gained pertinence in both the scholarly and artistic arenas, and its meaning, usage and critical potentialities have undergone a major shift. It has opened questions about mining imaginative capacities to foreground what is otherwise ‘irrecoverable’ and ‘unrepresentable’. Moreover, it has been seriously considered not merely to attend to the gaps in history but also to imagine new futures.

Fabulation has been conceptualised and applied under various names and with different propositions, depending on the social, epistemic and artistic contexts. Some of the key terms in this regard are speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016), critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008), afro-fabulation (Nyong’o, 2019), afro-futurism (Dery, 1994; Nelson, 2002), and feminist fabulation (Barr, 1992). Whether we take Haraway’s (2016) description on speculative fabulation as a “mode of attention, a theory of history and a practice of worlding” (p.213), or Hartman’s (2008) coining of ‘Critical Fabulation’ as a method of attending to the violence of the archive through imaginative storytelling, the common thread connecting these ideas is the insistence on imaginative capacities (whether we term it fantastical, fabulous, or unreal) as a way to attend to the inexplicable, ‘irrecoverable’, and ‘unrepresentable violence and subjectivities. Moreover, serious consideration is given to the project of liberating oneself from being caught up in the ‘real’ to be able to imagine ‘anew’.

Fabulation has been employed by a host of filmmakers and artists as well. Some notable artists and filmmakers in this regard are John Akomfrah, Diana Toucedo, Wanuri Kahiu, Cheryl Dunye, Penny Siopis, Tracey Moffatt, Asinnajaq, Mati Diop, Boong Joon Ho, Cindy Sherman, Wilfred Ukpong and Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group). Considering that a body of scholarly and artistic practices on fabulation already exists, why revisit and consider this theme? We believe that there is a need for focused exploration and interrogation of the following questions:

What are the conceptual, critical, and artistic affordances and complexities in mobilising and claiming fabulation as a method? How is it different from claiming fiction as a method?

Given the breadth of usage of this term across different social and epistemic locations, what are the competing notions and practices around the term? What can emerge from possible conversations drawing from different geo-political and cultural spaces and epistemic references?

How do we think about fabulation in a ‘post-truth’ era? In other words, how can we consider fabulation while attending to contemporary challenges but without returning to unquestionably accepting the truth claims of ‘documentary’?

What about fabulation makes it critically and conceptually relevant to attend to the inexplicable, irrecoverable, and unrepresentable acts of violence and subjectivities?

What are the possible (in)commensurabilities in mobilising fabulation towards different concerns – ‘human’, ‘sub-human’, ‘post-human’, ‘non-human’, etc.?

We are interested in works that explore, question and expand various facets of fabulation in artistic practices. Most importantly, short listed contributors are expected to be available to attend in-person, the two-day workshop in March or April 2025 and be amenable to developing their contribution towards the journal issue scheduled for publication in Summer 2025.

Submitted proposals should include:

• An abstract of 300-400 words. The abstract should explicitly delineate the artistic work(s), where applicable, and clearly establish and/or outline connections to the analytical context of fabulation.
• A biography of no more than 150 words, with pertinent links to practice and/or publication websites.

Here is the link to our online submission form. Deadline 20 November 2024.

Please share in your networks.

PARSE supports a range of audio-visual and textual formats and with this issue we strive to combine a range of communication genres, including interviews, conversations, case studies, specific research projects and broader critical-theoretical analyses and reflections.

 

Editors for the PARSE issue Fabulation:

Jyoti Mistry, Professor of Film, HDK-Valand /Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg

Ram Krishna Ranjan, Lecturer in Film, HDK-Valand /Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg.

 

References:

Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Heinle & Heinle: Thomson Learning. p. 196.

Piérola, J. de. (2022). Fabulations. Kernpunkt Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. p. 213.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12(2), 1-14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Nyong’o, T. (2019). Afro-fabulations: The queer drama of Black life. NYU Press.

Dery, M. (1994). Black to the future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In M. Dery (Ed.), Flame wars: The discourse of cyberculture (pp. 179–222). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Nelson, A. (Ed.). (Summer 2002). Social Text, 20(2), 1–146. Duke University Press.

Barr, M. S. (1992). Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. University of Iowa Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20h6vjv