Call for papers

The feeling of longing is dependent on the feeling that something is missing. It is a traumatic indicator of an acquired lack. When vacancy becomes a bodily experience that feels anything but vacuous, we assign the term “longing” to negotiate the contradiction—empty can sometimes take up so much space. But the acquisition of lack is, in itself, a contradictory turn of phrase. What does it mean to gain and lose simultaneously? The scope of the word expands when considering “longing” as an abstract, often unseeable, exchange. Much more than a desire to find whatever is missing, longing functions as a state of being, a phenomenology that can’t always be remedied. The corporeality of longing is matched then by a psychological conditioning that is sometimes, if not consistently, out of one’s control.

The historical and social governance of (be)longing runs parallel to longing as a sentiment. The ability of an individual to compensate for their own gains and losses is largely pre-appointed by laws and social convention. This means that a state of longing, much like a state of belonging, is political. It turns out you can lose something you never had… And, this is the most potent, and perhaps difficult, mode of longing—for when you can’t figure out what you lost, there’s a chance it might never be found.

How then is longing, in its myriad forms, represented as a quality ubiquitous to the human condition and yet specific to a subject position? In flux between the universal and the intensely personal, longing evades a concrete semiotics. A word untied to a visual signifier, longing may manifest in a wide range of sensory projects. KAPSULA welcomes papers that think critically about the feeling of longing and its representations, particularly in relation to contemporary art practices.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- The contradictory nature of longing, as addressed in contemporary art and visual culture
- Longing and belonging (as political/linguistic/phenomenological corollaries)
- Presence and absence and their affective dimensions
- The anti-aesthetic and its psychological implications
- Desiring art—the capacity art has to evoke longing (towards a subject, object, concept, history, the Self)
- Longing for a change—the relationship between longing and notions of future

Send full papers, abstracts or proposals to submissionskapsula.ca. To see past issues and submission guidelines visit our website: http://kapsula.ca/