Submissions
IMPOSSIBLE ARCHIVES​
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Archives are often imagined as architectures of knowledge: places where the past is organized, protected, stabilized, and made legible through systems of order. Yet archives are never neutral. They exclude, name, and classify generating memory as much as preserving it. Across different times and geographies, the act of archiving and collecting has taken many forms. It has embodied as state repositories and monastic libraries, cabinets of curiosities and colonial herbariums, natural history collections and forensic databases, oral traditions and embodied repertoires, family albums and community memory projects, as well as the sprawling, volatile infrastructures of the digital cloud. In each case, the archive as a collection of ordered records does not simply hold the world: it actively shapes what can be known, remembered, and claimed. It constructs a form of constructed truth based on evidence.
This issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, co-edited by Giovanni Aloi and Cristina Baldacci, invites submissions that think creatively about archives of all kinds, especially those entangled with nature, ecology, the more-than-human, and the visual cultures that surround them. In part inspired by Baldacci’s book Archivi Impossibili (2016), the issue is interested not only in archives that preserve, protect, and classify, but also in those that resist and challenge boundaries, hierarchies and order: archives that are fragmentary, speculative, excessive, illegible, ephemeral, sensorial, living, or deliberately “impossible”, since they undermine the idea of archives of modern origin.
What happens when the archive is no longer a guarantee of truth but a contested field, one shaped by extraction, erasure, environmental transformation, and competing claims to belonging?
We are especially interested in submissions that probe the archive as a site of tension between care and control, between memory and governance, between evidence and imagination. How do artists and thinkers reconfigure archival practices to challenge inherited hierarchies of knowledge? What does it mean to archive what refuses containment like ecosystems, climates, migrations, extinctions, toxins, animal lives, plant temporalities, microbial agencies, or geological deep time? Can the archive become a tool for repair, restitution, and ecological accountability or does it too often reproduce the logics of possession that underwrote colonial and extractive world-making? And how might “impossible archives” help us perceive what conventional systems of documentation have historically failed to register: more-than-human histories, minor ecologies, vernacular knowledges, suppressed lineages, and forms of life that exceed human categories?
Antennae welcomes essays, creative works, and visual contributions that approach archives through art history, visual culture, environmental humanities, critical plant and animal studies, media theory, anthropology, memory, museum and heritage studies, Indigenous and decolonial scholarship, activism, and artistic research. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches that test the limits of what an archive can be, what it can do, and whom it can serve.
Please submit an abstract of 350 words with title, 3 images, a short bibliography and CV as one PDF document to antennaeproject@gmail.com
Deadline: May 1st, 2026
Deadline for final, accepted submissions: September 1st 2026
Academic essays = length 4000 words max
Artists’ portfolio = 10 images along with 1000 words max statement/commentary
Interviews = maximum length 5000 words
Fiction = maximum length 5000 words
Roundtable discussions = 4000 words
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