At the end of April — six weeks into navigating the fog of grief and trauma that marks the Covid crisis in the United States — Bruno Latour shared an exercise¹ of six questions to assist a collective reimagining of the future by examining our current circumstances. Latour stated, “It is only later, if one were to give oneself the means of compiling the answers of many respondents and then composing the landscape created by their intersections, that one could find a form of political expression — but this time embodied and situated in a concrete world.”

In the spirit of the prompt, I wrote to artists, writers, curators, and arts organizers to ask what they imagined of this moment and for the future, commissioning short texts in response. Perhaps, through a communion of imagining, publication can be a ripe form to explore the intersections of elastic futurism, critique, and social justice, particularly in an ecosystem of other publications and multiplicities of activism and practice. This series welcomes togetherness in difference.

Critical Communion convenes these critical responses based upon mutual participation, sharing, and intimacy. These works are image and text-based and will be published slowly and irregularly. The brief nature of the responses is meant to extend the work past itself; can we read all writing as a prompt? Can we understand texts not as immutable declarations, but rather as documentation of thought and process, reflective of the ways we grow, change, and evolve?

Thank you for reading, thinking, and feeling along with us,
Jenna

PS: With the publication of these first few texts is also a call for new works and new responses: What are the sustained or new urgencies of your world(s)? What needs to be built or destroyed? What revelations or rebirths are underway? What practical shifts must we make now to realize a sustainable and just future for all? If these are the wrong questions, what should we be considering instead? Submissions will be reviewed on an ongoing basis and all writers will be paid for any works published. More information can be found here.

Jenna Crowder

Jenna Crowder, Co-Founding Editor at The Chart, is an artist, writer, and editor. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, BURNAWAY, Temporary Art Review, The Rib, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and VICE Creators Project, among other places.

jennacrowder.com