A note on curation:

LOCULUS Collective is the collaborative work of Madison Palffy and Olana Flynn. The most recent issue of The Loculus Journal, map of slight askew, was released in January 2020 as a fully online journal and was curated by the two of us through an open call. As two white, middle class women, sometimes working in academia, we are committed to transparency and recognizing the power structures that emerge in the curatorial work that we do. A lot of questions have come up in our discussions since January about exactly how to proceed with the journal. Questions born from wanting to maintain relationships with contributors and build on the momentum of map of slight askew, the responsibility to recognize and push against some of the power dynamics at play between curators/editors and contributors,  the desire to maintain some of our DIY punk roots where relationships are often established through word of mouth or friends of friends, and the commitment to developing community that remains in real life, embodied connection despite our move to an online platform. In this moment as the world is contending with white supremacy and unsettling power structures made extremely visible by the global pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprising in the United States, and it's echoes and reverberations internationally our priority is addressing these overlapping issues in how we create a journal. 

The next Journal will include work curated from this open call by LOCULUS along with a diverse cohort of readers as well as work selected by previous journal contributors from their communities. 

This call is in the form of the image below. It intentionally non-linear, visual rather than literary, and is a series of  lists of intersecting thoughts and theories we believe to be essential to creating embodied art in this moment. It is meant to be interpreted infinitely; we will accept work of any medium. Our only requirement is that the body/embodiment/dance is central to the work you submit.