LOST FUTURES issue 1 - call for submissions

I have wanted to make a zine for FOREVER. I kept planning to. Since the days that my friend Max and I would challenge each other to poetry prompts and make glitchart covers for magazines that would never exist, I've wanted to make a zine. It never quite happened. I felt like I didn't know what I was doing or no one would care.

I think I didn't really take myself seriously as an artist until this year. For the last six weeks or so, I've been following Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way in an attempt to stimulate some level of creative recovery. I love getting to grips with all kinds of art. For years I surrounded myself with artists - friends, relationships, people I would pore over in books or galleries.

It does no one any good to live inside the lines of someone else's sketches.

At the same time, my academic work has been moving closer and closer to futures - ones that we want or ones that we don't. The futures we hope for or the futures we know could have awaited us if things had gone differently. I always loved the film Sliding Doors when I was younger. The idea that if one tiny event happened differently, we would be in a different world entirely. At the same time, I've been working more and more with Mark Fisher's idea of hauntology - the shadows and contours of worlds that never quite made it into existence. Of worlds that could have been, and then weren't.

We know these worlds exist at a large scale - laws that didn't get passed, elections that didn't get won, and major decisions never taken. But these worlds exist for all of us, too. The weekends you didn't spend with the person you wanted to. The time you were late for the bus and got soaking wet and entered Starbucks at the same time as the friend you haven't seen for years. The tiny coincidences that make up the constellation of a human life.

In LOST FUTURES, I want to hear about those worlds. Worlds that could have been, should have been, or weren't. Futures that tried to bring themselves into existence but whose spark burned out. Of the lives you might have had if things were different.

LOST FUTURES will take submissions in any format. If you have an idea, we'll work it out. Primarily it is intended to be a paper zine format, but if you've got something that needs to be heard or watched, we'll work it out. If in doubt, contact me and we can think about how it might work.

I don't want to overthink this - but I'll take art, poetry, prose, design, stories about your life, photography, documentation of exhibitions, music, personal essays, extended rants, screenshots of texts you feel like somehow explain the meaning of life. Anything. We'll work it out together.

I have cash spare from a recent project so print costs are on me. Once print costs are recouped, whatevers left will be shared equally amongst accepted contributors. I'll work out more specifics when I've worked out how many contributors we end up with and stuff like that. I just want to give a platform to the beautiful and brilliant art I know you're all capable of and give you some cash for that. If LOST FUTURES doesn't make its print costs, then that's fine, and that's a loss I'm happy to take.

Email submissions to kieran[at]fractals design[dot]uk. If you have any questions then feel free to send them there too, or if you have me on another social media platform feel free to message me there.

Submissions are rolling but I'd like to get the first issue together over the course of the next month. If you're a first time artist or worried you're not good enough, I especially want to hear from you because promise me, your work is brilliant and beautiful and gorgeous and deserves to see the light of day.

See you at the end of the month - I can't wait to see what futures we can dream together.

EDIT: No one has suggested this but I just want to make clear that it should go without saying, I will not publish anything oppressive. No misogynistic, racist, hateful, ableist, transphobic, classist content. Explicitly trans and LGBTQ+ positive.