Artistic Practices under Conditions of Persistent Harm: Aesthetic Forms, Repair and Coexistence

Call for Paper 2/2027

Artistic Practices under Conditions of Persistent Harm: Aesthetic Forms, Repair and Coexistence
Deadline: October 15, 2027
Guest Editor: Dr. Luis Guerra Miranda (Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council)
Email: luisguerra@csic.es

Main Topic - Open Call for Papers. Allowed languages: English, Italian, French.
Across contemporary art and design, practices increasingly emerge and respond to conditions of displacement, ecological crisis, historical violence, structural injustice, precariousness and fractured forms of coexistence. Within aesthetics, however, these practices are often approached primarily through the categories of representation, critique, participation or political engagement. While these approaches remain indispensable, they do not fully account for the aesthetic implications of practices developed from within conditions of persistent harm.

 The issue therefore proposes a shift in emphasis: from asking primarily how art represents damage to examining how artistic and design practices configure forms of sensibility and experience through which harm becomes perceptible, shareable, contestable, or transformed.
Persistent harm is thus approached as a condition affecting artistic production, material processes, spatial organisation, temporal experience and collective participation. This perspective invites examination of the aesthetic implications of practices developed within circumstances in which damage remains unresolved and continues to shape the conditions of social, ecological and material life.
In this context, repair is not understood exclusively in terms of restoration, reconciliation or the return to a prior intact condition. Instead, it is comprehended as a set of situated aesthetic processes through which perception, memory, material engagement, and coexistence are negotiated. Repair can thus be approached through practices of making, maintenance, rehearsal, repetition, listening, bodily gesture, spatial reconfiguration, collective organisation and other operations whose significance lies not only in what they represent, but also in what they make possible at the level of experience and relation.
The open call invites contributions examining contemporary artistic and design practices that emerge within, respond to or intervene in persistent forms of historical, structural, political, ecological, colonial or material harm. Contributions may address visual art, performance, design, architecture, sound, moving image, curatorial and exhibition practices, socially engaged practices, or other forms of contemporary aesthetic production. The emphasis will be given to questions of temporality, embodiment, materiality, spatial configuration, collective practices and the production of situated knowledge. Contributions examining the limits of repair, including its potential to obscure responsibility, reproduce exclusion, aestheticise conflict or normalise damaged conditions, are equally encouraged.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Aesthetic forms and artistic practices under conditions of persistent historical, political, ecological, colonial or structural harm.
2. The relations between artistic practices, repair and the reconfiguration of coexistence.
3. Embodiment, materiality and performativity in aesthetic processes concerned with persistent harm.
4. Temporal experience, memory, repetition and unresolved damage in contemporary artistic practices.
5. Material processes, maintenance, making and collective organisation as aesthetic operations.
6. Spatial reconfiguration, colonial and decolonial, and their implications for artistic and design practices.
7. Situated, embodied and collective forms of knowledge generated through artistic production.
8. The aesthetic and political limits, tensions and ambivalences of claims to repair.

The call welcomes contributions in aesthetics and philosophy of art, as well as closely related research in art theory, art history, artistic research, design studies, visual culture, performance studies, memory studies, decolonial theory, environmental humanities and political aesthetics. Submissions may examine visual art, performance, theatre, design, architecture, sound, moving image, curatorial and exhibition practices, socially engaged practices and other forms of contemporary aesthetic production.
Contributions should develop a substantive engagement with aesthetic questions and artistic or design practices, offering conceptual analysis, theoretical investigation or detailed examination of specific practices.
The issue will also include an invited Special Focus, “The Performativity of Repair: Embodiment, Materiality, and Decolonial Spaces”, examining how bodily, material and spatial operations participate in the negotiation of repair under conditions of persistent harm.

Submission information
Deadline for full articles: October 15, 2027.
Expected publication: Last issue of 2028, December 2027/January 2028.

Articles should be submitted using the online submission system. They should be in .doc or .docx format, A4, paginated, double-spaced throughout (i.e. including references and quotations), with ample margins. They should be formatted for blind review, not normally exceed 7,500 words and should include an abstract of no more than 150 words and five keywords (in English). Tables and illustrations should be submitted to the online submission system in separate files from the main manuscript.