Esse arts + opinions is a bilingual contemporary art magazine publishing primarily critical analyses and essays on current artistic practices. Submissions (1,500 to 2,000 words maximum) must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to [email protected] by April 1, 2025. Please include a short biographical notice (35 words) as well as your e-mail and mailing address. We are no longer accepting notes of intent for this thematic section. Authors who have not submitted a note of intent may nevertheless submit a completed text by the issue deadline.

Damp viscera ooze across the pages of Jenny Hval’s 2018 novel Paradise Rot. Her profoundly weird world of putrefying food, decaying flesh, and fungus reminds us that everything is temporary. Bodies age, food spoils. Over time, everything falls apart. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all closed systems move irreversibly toward increasing states of decomposition. It’s not just physical structures that decay, but cultural, economic, and political systems also.

In the Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (1980), the French theorist Julia Kristeva describes decay as a privileged site of “mingling,” an ambiguous space where life is contaminated by death. Rogue taxidermists have engaged this site by developing new ethical practices of caring for dead animals. Resisting the entropy inherent in all living things, artists have explored the cryogenic storage of human embryos, semen, and eggs, and museologists struggle to preserve media archives from the digital decay that threatens to erase cultural memory. Other artists have collaborated with decay, staging its material forces in ephemeral installations and process-based art. Drawing attention to the domestic labour of compositing, ecofeminists remind us that putrefaction processes are powerfully generative. “Decomposers” such as moulds, fungi, mushrooms, and other micro-organisms break down not only organic waste but the synthetic debris of consumerism, facilitating toxin remediation in a creative transformation of death. Entangling the “human” with “humus,” Donna Haraway’s “hot compost piles” conjure multispecies worlds and alternate visions of what it means to be alive.

From deserted factories and infrastructures, from rotting media and flesh, emerge new possibilities of life in capitalist ruins. In his recent work on “unworlding” and the “aesthetics of collapse” (2024), the American critic Jack Halberstam encourages us to find queer beauty in the urban decay of predatory capitalism; the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) turns a mushroom into a modern parable of post-industrial survival and environmental renewal. In a similar vein, the Berlin-based theorist Hito Steyerl advocates for “poor images” (2009) degraded by generation loss. Digital decay, she argues, releases audiovisual production from capitalist circulation. As images deteriorate across copies and data transcodes—as they are compressed, copied, remixed, and ripped free from film archives and cultural patrimonies—they release a revolutionary potential.

For this issue, Esse arts + opinions solicits texts about decomposition and decay in contemporary art and theory. We invite papers that consider decomposition as a porous boundary between life and death. Can decomposition be an aspirational aesthetic phenomenon? How have artists engaged and resisted decay? How are queer feminist ecologies of death rethinking decomposition and waste? Can embracing decay counter the elegiac tone of extinction discourses? Does the movement toward decomposition incite acts of care for finite and vulnerable bodies and communities in the face of their inevitable undoing? We are seeking reflections on the critical and creative potentials that emerge from decay. We invite submissions that affirm rot and ruins, abandoned spaces, regenerative practices of composting, radical mycology and mycorrhizae mutual aid, and the queer beauty of decay, as well as critical accounts of “ruin porn” and the biopolitics of the decay.

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