Open calls
Every two years, we issue a call for projects that leads to the publication of a collective book, giving all photographers and writers the opportunity to publish. The aim of these calls for projects is to build a book around a subject that we believe is at the heart of contemporary issues. We are always on the lookout for authors willing to entrust us with their lines and eyes.
Red Utopias
DIALOGUES AND POLITICAL ARCHITECTURES
For this second open call, ESSARTER Éditions is calling on photographers and writers (historians, journalists, philosophers, …) to contribute work themed around the concept of political utopias in former Soviet states. In the aftermath of the centenary of the Russian revolution, communism remains solely possible for the moment in the unreality of literature or theory. The application of pre-existing socialist theories of Marx, Lenin or Stalin has been transformed into totalitarianism. This open call would like to express a curious reaction: the communist ideology, which denies any value to the past, still exists through a certain regret of the Soviet times. What is the intent of nostalgia for soviet communism: this is what we want to discover, we who first grasp it as a mortifying ideology. In 2018, ESSARTER Éditions will publish three books about political utopias through photography and text. The publishing of each new volume will be accompanied by a launching and meeting in a bookshop. Finally, a retrospective exhibition that gathers together the content of all the volumes will signify the end of the project.