The journal EFÍMERE starts its call for papers for Volume 2, which will be published throughout 2025 in continuous publication mode. In other words, papers will be published as they are received, reviewed and approved. The call for papers is also open for all other sections outside the monographic proposal.

 

 

In the next monographic issue of the journal EFíMERE, we invite researchers to write and reflect on the relations that exist between what we call fiction, or poetics of fiction, and what we pretend to present as a record of truth and in reality hides a thousand lies, from the perspective of art, artistic and visual practices and art education.

 

Our magazine is set in Valencia, which in October 2024 has suffered a devastating flooding catastrophe, provoked by the unstoppable climate crisis that science has been warning about for years. The DANA has left hundreds of deaths and a clear political responsibility of the government of the Generalitat Valenciana, for the lack of action in the adequate prevention of the imminent risk. But there is also a general global political responsibility for the lack of action to mitigate the effects of climate change. And a responsibility of the deniers of the truth who prefer to believe in the fictitious image of a world that does not exist, to avoid seeing their false security altered and cling to a registered image, not of a fictitious world, but of a false, lying world that has already vanished. An image that is intended to continue to be constructed with the support of the supposed certifying value of the image, to create an acceptable lie that covers up the truth.

 

This tragedy has meant the emergence, among the remains of the mud, of the rats of lies, in a world where the value of these falsehoods is built and strengthened by the need of many people who are unable to face the truth. Thus, a plague of ‘content creators’, basically, creators of obituary images masked in a non-existent truth, that is to say, in a fallacy. But also traditional media have tried to strengthen the chimera that the climate crisis does not exist, with far-fetched arguments, but constructed with the support of the registry media to which the role of certification, which we associate with the truth, is attributed.

 

In contrast, not only the thousands of scientific studies, but especially art, artistic photography, cinema, fiction series and numerous artistic projects from installations or exhibitions to performances, are showing us the truth, from a fictional narrative, which is necessarily educational.

 

 

A problem linked to the Anthropocene, whose multiplying effects start with humans and their actions, but go beyond the effects on human beings, including damage to other plant and animal species, to objects and the material. A situation that seems irreversible to us and that produces weariness, surrender, laziness, helplessness and submission, even before we have even tried to start the fight. A generalised subjugation in societies ill-educated to survive under the power of others, which enriches itself at the cost of voracious extractions, in turn fed by the excessive consumption of those same automaton masses whose consciences have been twisted and alienated for such a lucrative purpose.

 

A blindness filled with fast, voracious, immediate imaginaries, produced and reproduced in a loop, cooked and phagocytosed to be vomited or regurgitated in an insatiable hunger for more visualities that lulls minds and cares while life passes by. A time of supposed abundance and at the same time maximum debt, which allows an appearance of sustained wealth as window dressing and hides maximum poverty, especially in values.

 

A technologised era, dominated by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence that could well be replaced in time by an eco-ethical era in which artistic and educational practices would inspire society to value and protect ecosystems as part of their cultural identity, connecting humanity with the environment and the environment.

 

The DANA, that Isolated High Level Depression, arrives in Valencia like an indomitable torrent, a pulse of sky and water that sweeps the terrain, breaks down barriers, uproots and, finally, transforms the landscape. This unstoppable force is what is needed for a transformative artistic education that dissolves in improvised channels, that makes the walls of the everyday give way, that makes lies vulnerable to the unpredictable force of its critical storm. May the stream of consciousness unfold in society with the force of an eroding and shaping storm. May this other DANA, the educational and artistic one, dissolve the superficial layers of lies and reveal the hidden layers, revealing invisible structures, confronting the media that use visual and audiovisual strategies, our own artistic weapons, those that society has been deprived of through premeditated audiovisual illiteracy.

 

We are looking for research that focuses on the analysis of the role of visual fictions as a source of truth, as opposed to visual lies as a source of supposed truth, which generates a twisted and pernicious use of images; on which the role of art education must build a wall of containment and defence, through serious and rigorous analysis, but especially through the design of actions that allow the construction and conscious use of images, from what is usually associated with what we call fiction. Learning to use and create images and the value of truth that these artistic practices have in essence is a fundamental and urgent pedagogical challenge. It allows not only to prevent the false discourse of the lie of the registry obituary images, but also to enable people to deepen their thinking and their search for truth through poetic visual thinking. This enables them to understand that truth is not reached through a supposedly registered gaze, as has been demonstrated a thousand times over thanks to art, but through the deepening of a complex thought such as the one articulated through the arts.

 

The following approaches and research topics, among others, are proposed:

- The poetic image as truth.

- The role of the arts in the construction of visual, social and cultural truth.

- Actions and practices for the development of artistic media as a form of truth construction.

- The analysis of visual and artistic content as a promoter of sensitive consciences.

- Educational fiction narratives.

- The registered image as a lie.

- The role of the arts in the critique of visual, social and cultural lies.

- Actions and practices for the development of artistic media as a way of unveiling lies.

- The analysis of pernicious and manipulative visual and audiovisual content. Doctrinaire pseudo-real narratives.

- Artistic-pedagogical experiences and artistic-educational actions to raise social awareness of the problems of the Anthropocene.

- Artistic-pedagogical experiences and artistic-educational actions for an eco-ethical era.

- Etc.