Callouts for Short Creative Pieces on Abolition at the intersection of Mental Health & Racial Justice
As part of our ‘Community Responses to Mental Health’ workstream, we are looking to commission short creative pieces on abolition, racial justice and mental health, distress and trauma. These pieces will be published on our website and then archived in a creative format as part of our ‘Remembrance as Resistance’ piece of work.
As a whole, this piece of work will be showcasing the range of abolitionary approaches in this area. (By abolitionary, we mean the building of alternatives – rather than reforming – of punitive, oppressive, violent and/or carceral systems, institutions, and practice. And how this sparks new possibilities, questions, and pathways towards change and liberation for racialised people)
Themes/areas of focus to take inspiration from are as follows:
- Care work aligning (or not aligning) with carceral systems
- Mutual aid and community organising as alternatives to institutions and carceral systems
- Neoliberalism and austerity
- Joy as resistance
- Criminalisation of distress
- Immigration detention and the hostile environment
- Data and surveillance
- ‘Policing’ in education
We are looking for:
- Artwork: pictures of paintings, photography, prints, embroidery, drawings, collage, digital/visual art
- Poetry: written, or you can film/record yourself doing a reading
- Original songs or music
We can offer payment of £150 to the selected artists we publish. We will only be accepting pitches from U.K. based artists who are racialised as Black or People of Colour with lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, and/or distress.
If you’re interested in this, opportunity, and before you begin work on your piece, please send a short brief of say 50-100 words around what you might like to produce to synergi.info@nsun.org.uk We will then get in touch to have a chat about taking it further.