OPEN CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS. Beyond Human Communality: Enounters and Limits

OPEN CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS  Beyond Human Communality: Encounters and Limits ArteActa is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal for performative arts and artistic research, offering publication in multimedia formats (text, hypertext, photo, video, audio), mostly presented in Research Catalogue expositions (www.researchcatalogue.net) or as film essays. ArteActa welcomes artistic research projects on the following topic: → Beyond Human Communality: Encounters and Limits Abstracts submission deadline – 30. 4. 2025, max. 300 words  Final projects deadline – 15. 9. 2025 Contact: redakce@arteacta.cz

The development of posthumanist thought in philosophy and art theory in the 20th and 21st centuries accelerated the questioning of anthropological dominance. It focused on exposing the limits of the Enlightenment rational tradition that emphasized man and his reason. The former critical uncovering of the apparatuses and mechanisms of inequality in human civilizational structures was thus joined by questions of equitable interspecies coexistence and a rethinking of the role of the human being in the context of a more-than-human community. The cultural and historical conditionality of thinking about man himself became visible. Ways of seeing the world through "non-human" perspectives such as nature, animals, technology, etc. began to open up more intensively than before (in the work of Foucault, Agamben, Berger, Badmington, Haraway, Hayles, Braidotti, et al..).

A more radical step away from man was brought about by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (Meillassoux, Harman, Bryant, Morton, Bogost). In response to these currents, a myriad of creative and discursive approaches to speculating about beings beyond our consciousness have emerged, bringing strong emphases towards ecology, environmental studies and techno-utopia, but also towards "human phenomena" such as empathy, solidarity and intersectionality, and even towards the return of objecthood and materiality in the visual arts. Many writers (e.g. Harman or Shaviro) associated with these movements also stress the role of aesthetics in engaging with the non-human world: we cannot think beyond our thinking, but we can - and often unconsciously do - connect to the world through feeling. At present, we observe a certain oversaturation or exhaustion of stylistic and substantive expressions associated with the aforementioned directions, with the conceptualization and materialization of perception beyond our consciousness.

Modernist versions of humanism and posthumanism create an opposition between nature and society, between the human and the non-human world. It is not only in philosophy that thinking is changing - in biology, too. It has been shown since the 1960s (for example, through the research of Jane Goodall) that culture is not just the prerogative of humans - cultural and symbolic habits can be observed among elephants, monkeys and other animals. Donna Haraway attempts to bridge this divide by emphasizing interspecies interdependence, and in this direction we see a great potential for future artistic research.

In her influential book, When Species Meet (2008), Haraway noted that she is primarily interested in two questions - who and how does she touch when she touches her dog, and how is "becoming with" a practice of becoming worldly? Being an individual always means being part of other systems, whether internal (such as the bacteria in our bodies) or external. Art projects can then visualize and make these dynamics present, becoming an experimental field for establishing or revealing these relationships. 

We are also interested in reflecting on the limits and boundaries of imagining and speculating about the world beyond human existence, as well as in finding methodologies and strategies that might facilitate such exploration. From these analyses, certain inspirations or lessons should emerge regarding the interactions between human and non-human communities.  We want to give space to such artistic investigations in which humans think or live with animal entities and structures, whether real or fictional/mythological, and in which exploring the conditions of these types of interactions leads to an opening and shifting of human perception, imagination and coexistence.

We welcome artistic-research submissions, especially in the fields of performance, sound, visual and film art, that address the following themes: 

1) Animal(s) and animality 

Attempts to see the world through the "eyes" of the non-human seem to be just as ineradicable as the critical condemnation that they inevitably lead to naively anthropomorphic analogies. We are less interested in the question of whether such a "seeing through the eyes" of the nonhuman is possible in principle, but rather we welcome practical experiments aimed at it, including the conceptual and aesthetic tensions, contradictions, antinomies and absurdities associated with it.

The anthropocentric worldview has typically seen the world of humans and animals (non-human communities) in binary oppositions of nature and culture. The separation of these worlds has been underpinned by dicursive practices that legitimise the dominance of humans over non-humans in terms of their exclusivity and uniqueness. Recent research in the sciences and humanities (neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.), however, points to a far greater interpenetration of these worlds (e.g. synthetic communication in whales, the architecture of bird nests, evidence of abstraction in apes, etc.). How does art explore or reflect on the interpenetration of these worlds? In what ways are animals or animality (even in us) an inspiration for contemporary art?

2) Interaction with (non-)human communities 

Thinking about animals or existing with them, imagining their world without us, and observing their communities in a given context is understood as a form of internal dialogue that sets human thought and imagination in motion. Our interaction with the non-human world is often reduced to exclusive approaches or tends to slide into uncritical fantasies of interspecies unity. We are interested in the sensory and social avenues that such interaction can open up. What can we learn without imposing our ideas and expectations on non-human beings?  And what ethical challenges do we face?

3) Critical mythology 

Human cultures have attached special significance to animals - through animal characteristics a relationship has been established to nature, to the human being himself, to his identity or the identity of the whole community. Meanings associated with the non-human world are constructed in human culture through various mythological connections. Supernatural ideas about animals and their connection to humans say more about the culture of a given community than about nature itself. How is it possible to critically approach mythological images, stories, and deep-seated principles, both good and bad, that the mythological connection between animals and humans entails?

4) Discursive colonialism 

How animal and human communities are seen and imagined are culturally conditioned. Eurocentric rationalism and epistemology have displaced the magical human/nature coexistence. There is thus a certain flavour of discursive colonialism to the ethnological and animist turn in art.  What strategies does contemporary art use to respond to these discursive challenges and to transcend them? What form do these strategies take in different local territories of the contemporary global world?