Recovery Room
Open Call
COMMODE invites artists, writers and curators to respond to the question of sickness or disability as a way of working in the arts.
This proposition begins from a simple condition, that the body sets limits. Time can quickly become uneven. Our capacity fluctuates. Work, no matter how planned, can become interrupted or delayed. It may be returned to, it may not. Under these conditions, the structures that organise the arts such as deadlines, openings, or production come into tension with lived experience.
Rather than treating this as an obstacle to overcome, this call asks what happens when those conditions are taken as a methodology.
What forms of art and exhibition making emerge when time isn’t linear?
How do curatorial decisions and artistic processes shift when attention is fatigued?
What does it mean to curate or produce work that does not aspire to productivity?
Sickness and disability reconfigure our relations to labour and care. They introduce forms of knowledge that are often excluded from institutional rhythms. Rest, waiting, repetition and maintenance become daily, structuring conditions. Working can become shorter, slower and fragmented. It may unfold over time rather than arrive fully formed. It may not be coherent, or resolved.
We are not asking for disclosures of sickness and disability, or narratives of recovery. Instead, we ask contributors to consider how their methods shift under conditions of constraint, how artistic production adapts to the body, and how practice might reorganise.
Contributions may take any form:
fragment
notes
correspondence
text that remains unfinished
Length and structure are open. Timeframes are flexible.
Writers are invited to work at their own pace, within their own conditions.
Please email your texts to info@commode.co.nz
COMMODE will publish these texts as they arrive. The project will remain open, accumulating over time. The aim is to hold a space where writing, and in turn artistic production, can operate differently.
