Call for contributions to an edited book on 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea

March 1, 2024: please send brief proposals (2-3 paragraphs) to uc1@nyu.edu and yathanassakis@ucsb.eduby 1st of March, 2024.

July 1, 2024: first full drafts of the accepted proposals requested by 1st of July, 2024.

Call for contributions (essays, think pieces, responses, interviews, engagements) to a book that critically documents, deeply considers, and imaginatively extends the impact of 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, an ecological art collaboration by Sarah Cameron Sunde and the world’s oceans.  

We call on researchers, writers, practitioners, and artists from any variety of fields and backgrounds to propose an essay, think piece, interview, artistic interpretation or continuation, that take as their 36.5 as their inspiration. 

Background: At 8:06 p.m. on September 14, 2022, Sarah Cameron Sunde completed an artistic and personal journey that had begun nine years before, at 11:15 a.m. on August 15, 2013.  The journey ended where it began, in the Atlantic Ocean, but in between those moments the performance circulated around the planet in imitation of its essential collaborator, the sea.  36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea visited six continents and held conversations with seven bodies of water and the people who live near them and love them. We now turn to the task of examining and remembering the complex process involved in creating each performance, understanding and articulating its ideas, insights, and inklings, and expanding its creative invitation and provocation.  

We invite proposals and/or expressions of interest in contributing one or more of the following:

~Critical engagements with the work, either in itself or in a comparative frame, and one or more of its themes, including (but not limited to): sea level rise, resilience, embodied knowledge and resistance, liminality, intertidal zones, internationalism and inequality, certainty and uncertainty, individual responsibility and planetary scale, personal time-tables and oceanic temporalities, Anthropocenic necessities and imaginaries, stillness and motion, beauty and terror. 

~an in-depth interview with one of the individuals or teams that facilitated the performance in the US, Mexico, The Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, or Aotearoa.

~A report from one of the individuals or teams, reflecting on the impact of the project on themselves and their community

~A personal reflection by a spectator/participant in the performance

~Speculative or actual proposals for artistic continuations of 36.5: potential becomings and imaginative aftermaths, in any medium, expressed in any form, including but not limited to: poetry, drawing, photography, design, sound, music, and movement. 

As the last item on our list suggests, we’re approaching this project as an opportunity to explore and experiment with different modes of engagement with art. While this project begins by centering one work in particular, its ambition (like that of the work itself) is to contribute to a deeply ecospheric conversation that speaks to our increasingly precarious planetarity.  We hope that the very process of assembling this book will create a space for testing out concepts and frameworks and practices for thinking and moving into the uncertain future. We therefore invite proposals for contributions of many kinds, forms, formats, and lengths.  

Please feel free to share widely with colleagues and students in the environmental arts and humanities (especially Ocean Studies/Blue Humanities) and in theatre, performance, and visual arts/studies.