Call for Papers, No. 41, October 2026

The Editorial Board of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies invites all potential contributors to send their papers for issue No. 41/October 2026 with the main theme International Concrete Poetry (1950–1970) and Art Books: A Cartography of Galaxies.

The guest editors for this issue are Dr Gustavo Tanus Cesário de Souza (State University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil) and Dr Antonia Cristina de Alencar Pires (State Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage of Minas Gerais, Brazil).

Concrete Poetry, an avant-garde movement that spanned the decades from 1950 to 1970, revolutionized poetic language by highlighting the materiality of words, their spatial arrangement, and the distillation of the lyrical discourse inherited from Modernism. As the first literary movement with international reach after World War II, it fostered cross-border dialogues and convergences, constructing a new cultural cartography through language – inherently global.

Yet its roots remained distinctly local, each responding poetically to its own political cosmovision of language. The movement challenged linguistic boundaries, integrating image, rethinking space (concrete, abstract, typographic), and exploring visuality, performativity, and typography as foundational forms – a critical human poetics bearing the flavor of kindred fruits.

This concrete universe comprised: In Europe: Eugen Gomringer; Max Bense; Gerhard Rühm; Ian Hamilton Finlay; Dom Sylvester Houédard; Arrigo Lora-Totino; Pierre and Ilse Garnier; Jiří Kolář; Vladimir Burda; Ana Hatherly; Salette Tavares; E. M. de Melo e Castro; Åke Hodell; Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd; Öyvind Fahlström; Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; Mirella Bentivoglio; Suzanne Bernard; Blanca Calparsoro; Betty Danon; Max Bill; Franz Mon; Helmut Heißenbüttel. In Asia: Kitasono Katue; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; Shima Sunada; Anna Aleksandrovna Tarshi. In Africa: Wopko Jensma etc. In the Americas: the Campos brothers; Décio Pignatari; Pedro Xisto; Lenora de Barros; Amanda Berenguer; Mirtha Dermisache; Octavio Paz; Ulises Carrión; Mary Ellen Solt; Emmett Williams; Severo Sarduy; Jorge Eduardo Eielson; Juan Luis Martínez; Kamau Brathwaite; among others.

This anti-synthetic cartography united poets across time and divergent aesthetic-political visions. Internal dissensions–such as debates over reason/function–were integral, exemplified by Brazil’s Neo-Concrete and Poema/Processo movements.

Their practice crystallized in constellations: geometric keyword arrangements, lexical repetitions revealing voids, collages, and deconstructed slogans. It bridged calligrams with digital typography, fused oral and visual poetics, and ignited poem-explosions of political-poetry. Through landscape explorations; amplified marginal voices; anticolonial linguistics and transcultural play etc.

Concretism is also credited with the radicalization of the concept of the artist’s book or the book-object. Although the idea of integrating word and image in books dates back to ancient practices—such as medieval illuminated manuscripts—and the subsequent use of techniques like lithography and woodcut in later centuries, it was in the second half of the 20th century, with the rise of the Concrete Movement, that this idea reached a high degree of subversion. This was achieved by breaking away from the traditional form and medium (the codex and paper) employed by books—even those that innovated in their proposals, such as the books of poets (Mallarmé, Marinetti, and Mayakovsky) and artists (Miró, Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp). The Concrete rupture manifested itself in the use of distinct forms, materials, and techniques to compose the works. Thus, by operating through the fusion or juxtaposition of media and their different semiotic codes, Concretism deepened the intermediality between the art of the word and the visual arts.

Vast are the constellations of poets who, being visual artists as well, explored the possibilities opened up by the Concretism: Isidore Isou (iconicity of letters); Asger Jorn (prints on collages); Wlademir Dias-Pino (poem-objects); Julio Plaza (poemóbilis); Lygia Pape (sculptural books); Yoko Ono and Dick Higgins (book-boxes); Edward Ruscha, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt (books published using graphic processes like offset and Xerox) – along with many others who, from the 1980s onward, advanced this field of word-art, experimenting with techniques, materials, and forms until arriving at installation-books, ultimately shattering the boundaries between poetry and visual arts.

The proposal is not to approach the past as a solution for the present, as a nostalgic resource, but rather – within this contemporary moment – to develop ways of uniting through our differences, (and precisely because of them), transforming them into luminous potentials. The ontological shift from language-as-object to language-as-subject is achieved through a radical convergence – in many different ways of doing it – that distills language to its material essence, where visual, spatial and sound constructs become sites of meaning.

This initiative seeks to revive and extend these networks of exchange. We welcome proposals examining:

• Collaborative cartographies and intersections with other avant-gardes;
• Unpublished archives (manuscripts, correspondence, exhibitions);
• Decolonial critiques of canon;
• Interdisciplinary approaches, including:
• Typographic materiality and experimentation;
• Semiotic theories and regional adaptations;
• Intermediality frameworks;
• Digital poetry, conceptual art, and design legacies;
• Historiographic revisions centering neglected figures (e.g. women concretists);
• Contemporary resonances in algorithmic writing; NFT art; spatial installations.

Potential contributors are invited to submit their full-text proposals, 3,000–5,000 words in length, formatted according to the Journal's stylistic guidelines, by April 30, 2026, at the latest.

AM Journal is organized into four sections: Main Theme, Beyond the Main Theme, Artist Portfolio, and Book Reviews. Only the first section, which is also the central one, is predefined by the issue's main theme.

Stylistic Guidelines can be found here.

All articles undergo double-blind peer review.

The issue is scheduled for publication in October 2026.

Please send your full-text submissions and queries (if any) by email to both the issue editors (gustavotcs@gmail.com, crisp563@gmail.com) and the Journal email address: amjournal@outlook.com.

Guest issue editors

Dr Gustavo Tanus Cesário de Souza and Dr Antonia Cristina de Alencar Pires

This Call is a part of the Creative Europe Program Project “Anthologies of Cooperation: Encounters in/through Artist's Book and Experimental Poetry”. The project is co-funded by the EU.