Notes On Our Theme
Mister Magazine Issue III offers our community three guiding themes: Heritage, Cultural Ecology, and Art. These guideposts are expansive and multi-faceted by design, and we have been incredibly heartened by the breadth of interpretations you have shared with us so far. As our submission window draws to a close, we wanted to honor our end of this wonderful conversation. Below, we’ve traced the constellations of ideas that have informed Issue III in theory and in practice. Stargaze for a while, and submit.
What we mean when we say HERITAGE:
Show us how you explore the past as a means of expanding what we know as the future. Gesture to your family; share your favorite taste of home; travel to your great, great, great grandmother’s doorstep. We are particularly interested in the places that heritage manifests materially. Who guides your hand when you write, draw, and dream?
Touchstones:
Meera Shakti Osborne’s collective tapestry-making project, Making History.
How to Build an Archive* and Stories from فلسطين, which list (re)discovering, (re)sensing, (re)claiming, (re)imagining, (re)membering, (re)materializing, and (re)making as crucial steps in the process of archiving.
The Sojourner Project, a mobile academy that creates multi-directional encounters with histories of struggle and practices of refusal that have emerged in different black communities.
Cave Art and food you eat with your hands.
What we mean when we say CULTURAL ECOLOGY:
Tell us how it feels to lay your full body to the land. Show us how you immerse yourself in the culture, environment, and science that has shaped your worldview. Send us research or artistic interpretations of non-human life, climate justice, and agricultural anarchy. Illuminate the ecological trajectories of your history and their impact on the food, ceremonies, and customs you partake in. How do current threats to land and its inhabitants effect the foundational elements of your culture and traditions?
Touchstones:
Atmos.earth, a publication that bridges critical and creative practices from deep ecology to ancient art techniques. Its intersections of ritual, science and art are what we hope to see in Issue III of Mister Magazine.
Feral Atlas, which compiles 79 accessible, deep-cut field reports by anthropologists, scientists, and artists, exploring and inviting us to engage with “feral ecologies.”
Palestine teaches the rest of the world about life, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library is a key figure in that education. The PHSL is an interactive art and agricultural project that creates dialogues surrounding agriculture heirlooms, biodiversity and survival. The PHSL and its traveling kitchen preserve endangered seed variants, traditional Palestinian farming practices, Palestinian history, and culture.
What we mean when we say ART:
What you make and what you make of it. Experiments with thought and form. We are excited to see your most expansive creative work, be it a painting, photograph, video, sculpture, or something that eludes definition entirely. If you think a piece doesn’t “fit” on the printed page, it’ll probably fit well in Mister.
We are also particularly eager to feature work about art in Issue III. What effect does your favorite painting produce? How did your favorite song shape your most recent sculpture? Where do you see art at your dinner table, in your mother’s face, in the light that falls on your porch at dusk? Send us work that reacts to and builds on the things that give you life.
Touchstones:
Ismatu Gwendolyn’s tried-and-true equation: A (art-making) = B (world-making) = C (truth-telling)
The indomitable Ash Hagerstrand, whose “altars to unwellness” combine digital animation, collage, and 3D printing (and who was featured on the first pages of Mister no. 2).
Barbara Christian’s The Race for Theory, which draws inspiration from Audre Lorde’s Poetry is Not a Luxury. These pieces frame the the act of feeling as vital step in the process of criticism, and the act of criticism as a vital step in the process of “saving our own lives.” Like Christian, who reverently cites the thinkers and artists who came before her, we want to see what happens when you write/paint/think alongside art rather than against it. We want to see you render criticism as an act of “promotion as well as understanding, a response to the writer to whom there is often no response.”
Ana Mendieta’s work and practice, which renders art as “the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.”
Montez Press’ free-wheeling radio projects, which connect disparate corners of the ‘art world’ through the sonic ether.
Land Art and Hair Art.
We anticipate responses to this call to be as expansive as the themes themselves. There is nothing more exciting than that.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss our themes in greater detail, please DM us or shoot us an email at mistermagazinesubmit@gmail.com. We love you and can’t wait to see what you submit.
Warmly,
Poppy and Tima
Editors-in-Chief
