Out of Stock – open call platform launch
Out of Stock is an artistic-research project that poses as a journal. Initiated by fashion theorist and art writer Edith Lázár, it asks questions about the contemporary significance of fashion and design and their ability to become ‘rebellious agents’ for imagining (future) scenarios. It focuses on speculative ways of thinking and wonderings through the lens of Eastern-European perspectives and sensibilities. In collaboration with Ana Labudović – designer and activist with a penchant for RISO printing – the project aims to develop into a playful platform of experimental ideas and forms of writing, thinking, and sensorial imagining.
Out of Stock appears under the frame of Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart/DE) where Edith Lázár was a fellow for Fashion Theory/Design, January-October 2019.
We thus invite collaborations that tap into East-European perspectives to ‘dress-up/ design/ fashion-up’ bodies and worlds for a time to come. Can speculative design and design fictions imagine future scenarios for other economies of bodies? What imaginaries, alternate setups or world-dimensions can be designed? What will these found future(s) ‘wear’? Can future living-kits respond through nuances to the culturally diverse area of the European ‘east’? A ‘we’ is a frail thing. These are thus gestures of exuberance, reactionary reminders of agency in a world where currently ideas of future(s) seem less fashionable. They shape a blind spear thrown beyond the horizon, towards a dim and obscure future shaping itself ‘out of spite’ to the neoliberalist strategies confining us to predictive outcomes.
It looks like we might have run out of stock, but the future is still to arrive!
Contributions: text based materials (essays between academic writing and journalism/ theory and literature mishmashes/ experimental writing pieces: 2500-4000 words); visual essays; soundscapes and music mixes; digital collages – all accompanied by short texts (any format: 800-1500 words). All contributions should be (still) in English.
Loose ideas with non-hierarchical preference:
- — reframing scarcity: speculative design and socialist strategies arching past and future(s)
- — messy histories and embodied spaces. From the fabrics to the screen; against all odds: relief, frictions and variations defying normative bodies and selfhood
- — ‘queering the future’ – thinking fluidity, porousness and wearing bodies of unknown
- — identity fictions and forms of de-localization (including journeys through from style, up to the digital realm, affective algorithms or sentient objects)
- — ‘fix-it!’ – rethinking ugly everyday aesthetics and the appeal of second-hand culture as tools for future scenarios
- — exuberant futures – science fiction: dressing up the bodies and the worlds to come (tech-fictions / outer-spaces/ hidden outer worlds/ everyday weird)
- — theory-storytelling: entangles of research, invocations, promises, and dreams as way to that ‘tell the future’
- — fashion and design as political agents for environment, when citizens from the future talk
- — the dangers of social design projects and the myth of technological progress
- — rethinking times of crisis and kits for running out of stock, if tomorrow still comes
- — body dress in the extended field – sound as clothing or atmospheric wear – music as trigger for imagination
All selected authors will receive a fee for their contributions.
Deadline for submitting your work: May 14th, 00.GMT (for time-tricking), with the subject ‘Proposal Out’ to: [email protected] For other details or questions on work-in-progress materials and ideas, feel at ease to virtually get in touch.
Out of Stock will develop as an open-access online platform, with all its materials free to download and printable at home inviting mix & match versions of the journal.