FREE DREAMS

Free Dreams Issue 5: Open for Submissions

With our upcoming 5th issue, we at 1919 aim to build upon the work and momentum that we are witnessing, not only in our communities, but around the world. We aim to build upon the genealogy of freedom dreaming ignited in our last issue, Reimagining Community, and in the cultural products of our leaders and ancestors. We aim to bear witness and take part in the collective reckoning of our current moment, while remaining connected to the histories of struggle and grounded to our ancestors before us, who have bared the brunt of the pain we feel today. 

We are also bearing witness to hope, to determination, and to the vitality of our dreams.

With our upcoming 5th issue, Free Dreams, we ask you, can you dream freely? can we? why not? what does that feel like? do we sacrifice ourselves? dream freely about the linguistics of a new language, the geographies of a new city, the streets of a new community, the walls of a new home, the love wholly present in transformative justice, words that mean things, actions that produce things, and a love that imagines things. 

The topics guiding us in this issue are Black liberation and freedom. How do we connect our animated dreams to the energy of historical upheavals mounted by dreamers before us, who, as Kinfe Abraham mentions “became active not only in the artistic field but also in the wider sphere of the social and political changes affecting their community as a whole?”  How do we use our dreams and the art that they birth to take us to a new future?

Frameworks, Key Words, and Guiding Questions:

Some of the frameworks that we have been working with are abolitionism, Black-Indigenous solidarity, experiences with gender and sexuality, borders, placemaking, food sovereignty, political resistance, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. But feel free to dream outside of these structures too. 

Key Words

• Possibility

• Disrupt

• Reclaim 

• Protection

• Intimacy and Community

Guiding Questions

How have we renewed, reclaimed or revitalized the revolutionary dreams of our ancestors?

How do we expand on those dreams and recognize that this project is ongoing? 

How can we protect and promote our dreams .. how can we dream in a safe space where were not always disrupted and alienated how we usually are?

How can we work to protect, promote, and preserve the contributions of cultural workers in our communities?

How can we look beyond capitalist understandings of art and creative labour in ways that encourage revolutionary and abolitionist cultural work?

Submit your photography, media art pieces, multimedia collages, all forms of informal and formal prose, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, plays, and other creative work and questions to submissions@1919mag.com.

1919 is passionate about creating alternatives to platforms and institutions already deeply entrenched within the assimilation of Black and racialized groups. All submissions selected for our print publication are PAID and we only accept submissions from Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists and cultural workers.