From Nyx, Noctournal :::
For its eighth issue, Nyx, a Noctournal seeks contributions that question the concept of skin: a border that demarcates inside and outside, a threshold that contains and translates identities, a tissue to be punctured and marked. Skin is the fleshy membrane that signals the point at which we become in-the-world, communicating our history as it weathers in the face of time. It is the interface of human embodiment, and the most ubiquitous signifier of self-as-object.
But skin also contains an infinity of parallel identities, a site of identity (and escapism), identification, and appropriation. The consumer industries demand it to be ever leaner and cleaner, whilst elsewhere it is criminalised, categorised or killed simply for its colour. This troublesome, protective and unstable expanse is a continual site of conflict, claimed and reclaimed in exercises, markers, inks and identities.
Nyx Noctournal calls for contributions that caress, pierce or peel back skin, which could address:
- blackness, whiteness, race
- gender studies and identity
- sex, pornography, pornification
- tattooing as modern ritual
- mutilation and the war-damaged body
- self-harm
- policing the skin, epidermic interventions
- skin as limit/liminal border
- skin as surface, phenomenon and facade
Please send abstract proposals of no more than 200 words / 5 images, inc. a very brief biog, to noctournal@gmail.com by 15th November 2012. Publication is aimed for early Spring 2013.
Dan Taylor 