Careful/Care-full Collaboration

Creative collaboration is an opportunity to summon and practice ways of being in the world and with each other that challenge myths of exceptional individualism as constructed within colonial and capitalist contexts. This type of collaboration can acknowledge and affirm that making art is not an isolated event, and has the potential to share and/or redefine power between artists and the communities in/with which they work. The dynamic and responsive work that emerges from entangling minds, perspectives, and positionalities speaks and models on the page or screen, through the body or soundwaves, the care and imagination that is integral to community building and kin-making. Creative collaboration is a method and commitment to seeding and nurturing webs of knowledge, histories, practices, and relationships with each other and the places that are sacred to us.

Guided by this understanding, the Spring 2025 issue of About Place Journal invites submissions that contemplate what it means to collaborate with others through practices and processes that are careful and care-full, that is collaborations that are cautious at various stages and shaped by an ethics of care between the artists, for their communities, and throughout the process of co-creating. Submissions are open January 1 - March 10, 2025.

Keeping in mind the core values  of the Black Earth Institute to use Art to “promote an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings and this earth we share” and to “work toward a society based on Justice, Spirit, and Earth Centeredness…” this issue invites joint submissions from artistic collaborators that make transparent the practices, processes, and creations that connect them to each other, honor the earth, engage with spirit, and promote/fight for justice in ways that require careful and care-full attention to individual and communal needs and desires.

We are interested in submissions that define community and care, and that consider how/why collaboration necessitates careful or care-full approaches to creating, re-vision relationships with art, artists, community, nature, and/or the divine.  

Questions to explore include, but are not limited to: How does collaboration lead to care and what connects the two? How does conflict within collaboration lead to new ways to care about each other? What practices shape your work as an individual? As a collaborative unit? As a community? How are care-focused interspecies or inter-technological collaborations imagined or practiced? How does engaging with spirit or the spirits shape your creative practice? How, when, and why do we share our work with each other? 

We welcome your poetry, prose, visual art, audio, and hybrid forms of collaborative expression. Interviews, recorded dialogue, or other forms that document creative collaboration are also welcomed. Submissions from collaborative partners or groups will be prioritized over those of individuals.