Thanks for responding to our call for contributions! Before you submit a work, feel free to read through our notes below.
At s/W/s, we’ve been thinking about the impact of COVID-19 and circuit breaker measures on those amongst us excluded from state resources, or facing difficulties accessing community support.
We first started Amplifications, a compilation of community resources, to signal boost these efforts and serve as a resource for those seeking aid. Now, we've started Recirculations for cultural workers to redirect attention, resources, and labor to this growing mycelial network of ongoing COVID-19 efforts.
Given the enormous physical, mental, and resource strain during this time, please respond to these provocations at your own pace. These contributions are not about productivity or production in a time of crisis. Instead, we're interested in residues of your creative practice that perhaps feel especially resonant at this point in time. Material scatters that seem unimportant, unfinished, but which nonetheless fill the substrata and periphery of our lives, while also drawing attention to very real and urgent needs in this moment.
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The "asks" to be published alongside your contributions are for you to articulate needs and wants, whether for specific communities and/or yourselves during this COVID-19 period.
As needs expand and social interactions narrow, we’d like to find new ways of orienting ourselves as cultural workers. We hope to move away from the saviour/saved binary of help and help-seeking—so intuitive to existing institutional forms that “administer” help to the vulnerable. Instead, what are your asks, wants, and needs? What and who may these be made on behalf of? How would your contribution cultivate ways to give and take care—veined with respect, recognition, and dialogue?
You could provide your patreon or paynow details, if you need financial support to tide through this difficult period; list down organisations that you would like for people to support; or an action you wish supporters would perform.
Thank you for taking the time, and feel free to contact us at
softwallstuds@gmail.com with any questions!
xx
soft/WALL/studs
