SHIFTER 9 - Call for Entries
Deadline: September 4th, 2006
Ruin|Monument
The word monument derives from monere - to remind, warn. The monument as we think of it, the emblem which always points idealistically, emphatically towards utopia, a dream, is fatalistically anchored to a memory, that which has already been. Furthermore the monument is the memory of a dream, a failed utopia. As Svetlana Boym might say, the monument is the ruin of the future - the future that never happened.
I wonder if we can propose a re-reading of Benjamin's proposition** as follows: We are the angels of history. We look towards the ruin of past events formulating constellations (chains of events). We understand the future that is behind us through these constellations. The storm from Paradise which propels us towards the future is precisely the same as the storm which has destroyed our past. It is this contradiction which allows us to continue moving backwards as we imagine the future as the next ruin in our unfinished constellation. The ruin is the embodiment of the future - history. The Ruin is The Monument.
This issue of Shifter, Ruin|Monument will attempt to explore these questions - questions which are pressing as a city just built has been once again destroyed. The monument here? Relegious dogma, Political power, Machismo. We the angels read our newspapers, the winds of paradise catching under our wings.
1) The fragmented | The unified
2) The fractured | The intact
3) The erased | The extant
4) The silence | The voice
5) The fleeting | The fallen
6)
Specifications:
Please send all submissions/ questions to shiftermail@gmail.com
Images should be formatted as jpgs, 8-10" wide at 120 dpi
Texts can be sent as word docs or pdf's
SHIFTER is a topical online magazine that showcases the work of emerging artists and writers and can be viewed at : www.shifter-magazine.com
Editor: Sreshta Rit Premnath
Associate Editor: Gonner Heiliger Von Lugen
Critical Advisor: Pieter DeHeijde
Design + Copy: IF Productions
SHIFTER also hosts the ongoing web-based project titled "The Museum of Contextual Amputations." Please visit www.MuseumOfContextualAmputations.org for more information.
www.shifter-magazine.com
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"..A spectral figure now appears before him - the "genius of Tombs and Ruins" - and spirits him high, into the air, from which lofty vantage he sees the globe spotted with deserts, fires, and fugitive and desolate peoples. It is a law of nature Volney surmises, that all things must fall into ruin. But the apparation corrects him: the hideous earthly vision above which he floats at a sublime distance, is not natural at all. It is, precisely, human history."
-A description of a passage from Comte de Volney's Les Ruines, ou Meditation, sur les revolutions des empire, (1792) - Excerpted from Brian Dillon's essay "Fragments From a History of Ruin"
** "A Klee painting named
