DECAY​

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Otto Marseus van Schrieck, 
Forest floor still life with flowers, mushrooms, butterflies, a snake, a frog and a dragonfly,

Mid 17th century

 

 

Beneath the forest floor, in the damp darkness of fallen leaves, and within the softening flesh of overripe fruit, countless forms of life are at work. As organic matter decomposes, its elements return to the soil, nourishing new organisms and sustaining ecological relationships. Yet, despite its regenerative power, decay remains profoundly unsettling. Associated with death and contamination, it evokes what Julia Kristeva, in 'Powers of Horror' (1980), theorized as abjection: the visceral disturbance provoked by the collapse of boundaries between self and other, life and death. Our efforts to preserve permanence, through embalming bodies, conserving objects, or sanitizing environments, reveal a deep discomfort with the transformations that make life possible.  

                             

The sumptuous arrangements of fruit, flowers, and dead animals in seventeenth-century still-life paintings traditionally evoked mortality and the transience of earthly pleasures. Yet these representations also reveal the sensual richness of decomposition and the unstable boundaries between life and death. Beyond Western traditions, diverse understandings of ancestral continuity, impermanence, and material transformation offer alternative conceptions of decay as integral to existence. How might art help us reconfigure these perspectives and challenge our inherited assumptions?

At a time of accelerating ecological collapse, reconsidering decay has become increasingly urgent. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explores in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), fungal ecologies reveal the possibilities of multispecies collaboration and survival within damaged landscapes. Meanwhile, practices such as human composting challenge funerary conventions by returning bodies to the soil. Contemporary artists working with organic matter, microorganisms, and fungal networks similarly explore decomposition as an active form of material agency, questioning the distinction between creation and destruction and challenging our anthropocentric attachment to permanence.

This issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture invites submissions exploring decay across art, visual culture, ecology, and philosophy. How might artistic practices help us overcome culturally ingrained fears of decomposition and foster more reciprocal ecological relationships? What can historically marginalized conceptions of death and material transformation teach us? How might fungi, microorganisms, and rotting matter challenge established ideas of authorship, materiality, and aesthetic value? Can decay be understood beyond loss and mortality, as a process of renewal and regeneration? And might an aesthetics of decay ultimately unsettle our attachment to purity, permanence, and control?

 

Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract of 350 words, including a title, 3 images, a short bibliography, and a CV, compiled into a single PDF document, to antennaeproject@gmail.com
Proposal Submission Deadline: December 1st 2026
Deadline for Final Accepted Submissions: April 1st 2027
 

 

Academic essays = length 4000 words max

Artist 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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