AGAIN

A Special Issue of The Pasticheur

Printmaking & Writing

Publication: June 2027
Submission deadline: February 15, 2027

Something happens. Then it happens again.

But what, exactly, has happened again?

For its June 2027 special issue, The Pasticheur invites printmakers and writers to consider AGAIN.

Printmaking begins with a peculiar relationship to repetition. A matrix can produce an impression, and then another, and another. We recognize each as the same image, although no two impressions are entirely identical. Ink changes. Pressure changes. Registration shifts. Paper responds differently. The hand returns.

Repetition produces difference, and writing knows this experience too.

We tell a story again. We return to a place. We translate a sentence. We reread a book years later. We repeat a gesture, a mistake, a ritual, a name. We revise. We remember. We rehearse. History seems to return. A word spoken once becomes something different when spoken again. And sometimes we simply ask: again?

Nearly a century ago, Walter Benjamin asked what happens to the work of art when technological reproduction releases it from its singular presence in a particular time and place. His question concerned photography, film, print, and the possibilities created when an image could travel beyond the physical object from which it originated.

Today the question has become stranger.

The physical prints published in this issue will never reach most of our readers. An impression will be photographed or scanned. It will become data. That data will reside on a server. When a reader opens The Pasticheur, a device will retrieve it and render the image anew: on another screen, at another scale and resolution, under different conditions of light, color, and attention.

What, then, has been reproduced? Where is the work?

And when it appears on your screen, has the work returned, been copied, been translated, or happened again?

Writing undergoes its own migrations. Words move from manuscript to digital file, through editorial intervention and publication, from server to browser, from one screen to another. A poem may occupy one shape on a computer and another on a phone. A story written once is instantiated repeatedly and encountered by readers who make of it something the writer cannot entirely determine.

Benjamin's problem of reproduction therefore remains with us, but AGAIN asks what that problem might mean under conditions Benjamin could not have foreseen.

For this issue, we are interested not in repetition as duplication, but in what repetition does.

·      What changes between the first time and the second?

·      When does repetition become transformation?

·      Can something ever happen twice?

·      Does an original remain an original after its reproduction?

·      Can a reproduction acquire a presence of its own?

And perhaps the stranger question:

What is it that happens again?

We invite printmakers and writers to approach these questions from wherever their own practices take them. Repetition may appear as recurrence, revision, ritual, return, translation, reproduction, memory, rehearsal, variation, obsession, habit, copying, iteration, inheritance, or something we have not imagined.

Benjamin is one possible point of departure, not a theoretical requirement. We are equally interested in work that challenges the premise of these questions, takes them somewhere unexpected, or discovers that AGAIN means something else entirely.

We are not looking for works that illustrate a predetermined idea of AGAIN.

We are looking for works that complicate it.

Printmaking

We welcome original work produced through printmaking processes, including intaglio, etching, engraving, drypoint, aquatint, mezzotint, relief printing, woodcut, linocut, lithography, screenprint, monotype, collagraph, photopolymer, and experimental or hybrid print processes.

Both existing and newly created work may be submitted.

Selected works will be reproduced digitally in The Pasticheur. Printmakers will be asked to identify the physical impression from which the published image was made, when applicable, including edition number, artist's proof, state, or other relevant information.

Writing

We welcome poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary or philosophical essays.

Writers need not write about printmaking, nor should submitted writing attempt simply to explain or illustrate a visual work. We are interested in what happens when different practices begin from a shared question and arrive somewhere independently.

The Encounter

Printmakers and writers are invited to submit independently.

Works will be selected first for their individual strength and engagement with the conceptual possibilities of AGAIN. During the editorial process, The Pasticheur may place selected visual and written works into conversation with one another, creating pairings or constellations that neither artist nor writer could have anticipated.

The relationship between works will not be one of illustration. It will be another occurrence.

Another encounter.

Again.

Submission deadline: February 15, 2027
Publication: June 2027

Please, click HERE to learn about the submission process.