Stichting antiwarcoalition.art is pleased to announce a new collaboration with the decolonial research laboratory Mycelium

AWC Journal #2
Mycelium Against Empires: Infrastructures of Dependency and Solidarity

Deadline: 1 September 2025, 23:59 CET
Fee: €200 gross
Send to: journal@antiwarcoalition.art

Mycelium is a decolonial research lab exploring colonial entanglements and practices of resistance through collective inquiry. Founded in 2023, it investigates of the investigation of colonial dependencies and decolonial practices through an infrastructural approach and a feminist lens.

Together with Mycelium, AWC Journal continues to explore the topic of infrastructure policy, this time through a decolonial approach. We invite contributions for the second annual issue of AWC Journal, dedicated to the theme of Decolonisation.

This issue grows out of our shared concern that the term decolonisation is often deployed as a metaphor, stripped of its political urgency, and increasingly appropriated by right-wing populist agendas. Following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's seminal statement that "decolonization is not a metaphor", we insist that decolonisation must be understood as a set of material, structural processes. Colonial dependencies are organised and reproduced through specific infrastructures – logistical, extractive, military, cultural –which often remain intact long after the formal end of colonisation.

We understand infrastructures in an expanded way — as complex material systems with political, economic, and affective dimensions. They can operate as mechanisms of domination, as described by Bani Brusadin in The Fog of Systems, but they can also become means of transformation and solidarity. As Deborah Cowen reminds us:

"Infrastructure is not only a vehicle of domination and violence. It is also a means of transformation. Alternative worlds require alternative infrastructures, systems that allow for sustenance and reproduction."

This issue will focus on two interconnected strands:

1. Colonial dependencies through infrastructures – including extractivist practices, militarisation, slow violence, and the persistence of imperial power relations. Here we engage with the framework proposed by Svitlana Matviyenko, Sitora Rooz, and E. Vincent (Technologies of Russian Colonialism, 2024), analysing how colonial technologies of occupation, persistence, and implication structure contemporary geopolitics.
2. Solidarity as a decolonial infrastructural practice – moving beyond symbolic gestures to examine solidarity as a material, infrastructural commitment. Drawing on Aruna D'Souza's notion of imperfect solidarity, we seek to explore how transnational alliances are built despite asymmetries, complicities, and contested histories.

We invite contributions from researchers, cultural workers, and artists worldwide, illuminating how infrastructures both sustain colonial domination and enable decolonial futures. We welcome diverse formats, including:

• analytical and research essays
• interviews
• visual essays
• performative scores
• mappings
• other creative or critical approaches

Submission guidelines:

Editor-in-Chief

Antonina Stebur is a curator, researcher, and writer, and the founder of the decolonial research laboratory Mycelium. Her curatorial practice focuses on colonial dependencies, feminist perspectives, and infrastructural approaches in contemporary art. She has curated or co-curated exhibitions at institutions including Zachęta – National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), the National Gallery of Lithuania (Vilnius), YermilovCentre (Kharkiv), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv), and others. She has published in ARTMargins, ArtReview among others.

The project is realised with the support of filia.die frauenstiftung