Technologies of the Sacred
NewsDeadline: 15 March 2016 for proposals and 30 March 2016 for finished works
We’re calling for “African Science Fiction Comics” – every word in that quote is contested but we won’t get into that here. Instead we’ll get this one out the way: Whatever it is we’re looking for, Lauren Beukes did not invent it.
We’re not interested in NGO-supplied African Futures either. Or artworld-induced Afrofuturism. We’ve been rejecting this idea of the future as progress – a linear march through time – for some time. Our sense of time is innately human: “it’s time” when everyone gets there.
Instead, technologies of the sacred. Technologies of dreaming. A world ungoverned by Western science, a world that requires improvisation at every moment (there is no routine in dreams, there is only the bewilderment of the constantly new).
And comics as the medium that best allow for this – allow for the super human and alien inside the human, insist on the impossible.
Please email editorial@chimurenga.co.za with thoughts and
queries soon.
The Deadline for proposals is the 15th of March, 30th of March for finished works. Each story will be 3-6 A5 pages, +/- 6 panels per page. Work must be to scale.
Image. Bitches Brew Album Art bu Mati Klarwein