Borderline writings: the word as artistic practice and the expanded body in writing
Volume 21- Number 2
Guest Editor: Marcia Cabrera*
DEADLINE CALL FOR PAPERS DATE : January 16, 2026
Artistic writing constitutes, essentially, an impossible and necessary act of translation. Impossible because art inhabits a pre-linguistic territory where meanings are gestated before words, because discursive language, with its linear syntax and sequential logic, never manages to fully capture the living experience of the creative process, that flow of intuitive decisions, bodily revelations and tacit knowledge that resist being fixed in conventional linguistic forms. Necessary, precisely because, by failing in its attempt to contain the ineffable, it generates an intermediate territory where creation thinks itself. In this interstice, writing becomes the imprint of gesture, vocabulary is the echo of perception and text is the map of a journey where the fundamental thing remains the unexplored territory that points without naming at all.
This act of translation functions as a bridge between two modes of knowledge that need each other, even if they never quite coincide. On one side, the academic, with its systematic rigor that orders, demonstrates and concludes. On the other, the artistic, with its organic truth that vibrates, doubts and reinvents itself. In that borderline space, where the academic and the artistic face each other without annulling each other, a vital tension emerges that keeps this writing in constant search for ways to express what may be unspeakable, but which is worth continuing to try to articulate.
In the face of conventional academicism, and its paradigms that privilege standardized methods of validation, that separate the researcher from their research, that maintain the fiction of an objective gaze; writing in art proposes writings (not only essays) that incorporate the poetic, the erratic and the autobiographical as valid forms of knowledge. These texts create their own grammars which resist the normativity of discourse, that is, the unspoken rules about what can be said, how it should be said, and who has the right to say it, transforming academic spaces from within not to subvert them, but to widen them.
This transformation occurs when borderline texts infiltrate academic circuits not to seek legitimization but to sow new questions: How to write from the body that creates? How can the word capture the pulse, movements and rhythms of the creative process? How to build a quotational practice from artistic endeavor? To what extent can conversations between artists become a methodology?
Art writing practices do not deny rigor but rather redefine it through borderline strategies that intertwine traditional and experimental forms of writing. For example, an essay that incorporates verses between theoretical quotations, a thesis that alternates conceptual analysis with fragments from a personal diary, a paper that is presented as a performative score.
In this liminal territory, writing is not necessarily a finished product, but an organic remainder of the process, a detritus that preserves the vitality of the tentative, the fragmentary and the unfinished. It is language in a germinal state, where each word carries the memory of its gestation; with its hesitations, fractures and latent potentialities. Writings that expand as constellations of voices, weavings of committed listeners and prowlings around the edges of what can be said.
The border is conceived not as a dividing line but as a zone of creative friction where the academic and the artistic are mutually reconfigured, allowing the entry of the knowledges that emerge from the practice itself and that bear the traces and resonances of each creative process: the marks of the workshop, the memory accumulated in the repeated gestures, the syncopated rhythms of improvisation in dance, the vibrations that persist in the sound laboratory.
In the face of models that privilege demonstration over inquiry, artistic writings propose an epistemology of doing, where quoting is weaving conversations between workshops, where evidence includes the testimony of the creative body and where methodology emerges from the materials as much as from the theoretical frameworks. Writings that assume a politics of enunciation that denaturalizes language as a transparent medium, revealing it as a disputed territory where each formal choice is a positioning. And they celebrate an ethic of incompleteness in which rigor is measured by the ability to sustain uncomfortable questions rather than definitive conclusions. Thus, what could be read as a limit, the impossibility of fully translating the creative experience, is transformed into potency: that untranslatable remainder is precisely what keeps writing alive, always in movement, always restarting.
This idea resonates deeply with the proposal of Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), in which she invites us to “let pass that other that we are and are not”. For her, this is not a simple literary device, but an ethical act that questions the illusion that our identity is fixed and coherent. In this liminal space where the self and the other are confused, writing becomes a refuge for everything that cannot be categorized or dominated. Complementarily, María Zambrano, in Claros del bosque (1977), teaches us that writing implies a “detachment from words and from ourselves”, a founding paradox that turns each text into a ceremony of loss and rebirth. Far from being a sterile contradiction, this double movement (affirmation/abandonment) constitutes the very heartbeat of critical thinking: only by letting go of certainties can we inhabit the fecundity of the imprecise, only by emptying ourselves of the desire to control can we perceive that knowledge that emerges in the margins. Knowledge which is revealed when we silence discursive thought for a moment to listen to the whisper of the materials, the unplanned gestures, the accidents that end up guiding the creative process.
We celebrate writing that dares to be political, through an intimate rebellion against the regimes of the sayable: words that are uproars, murmurs or manifestos, that construct meanings beyond the normative, that is, that challenge established expectations of what is ‘valid’ or ‘acceptable’ in dominant discourses, revealing how these same criteria of validation have been historically constructed to exclude other forms of knowing. As living fabrics, these writings expose their political seams: they choose what to silence and what to emphasize, what voices to amplify and what echoes to silence, in a constant act of critical editing of the world.
We invite contributions that explore the drifts, crossings or displacements between art and writing, where language becomes body and the body becomes language. Texts that reveal the intimate dialogue with the creative processes, allowing us to feel in their reading the breathing of the writer, their emphases and whispers. Texts in which operations, concepts and intuitions are strained in academic frameworks; that allow themselves to be inhabited by unforeseen associations, jumps, detours and, above all, by those words that matter (those that burn, those that weigh, those that resonate, those that insist). Because each word contains the force of a moment and, as a whole, they configure new spaces, times and forms of thought in permanent construction.
This call opens up a field of possibilities in which artistic writing unfolds in multiple directions. Rather than delimiting fixed axes, we propose fluid areas of exploration that suggest possible routes without exhausting the ways in which writing and artistic practice can dialogue. These are some starting points, coordinates open to be reinterpreted, combined or questioned:
- Textual fabrics: procedural diaries, networks of notes
- Citational constellations: maps of non-canonical or hegemonic influences
- Essays that adopt non-linear forms: texts that breathe to the rhythm of artistic thought, with structures that fold and unfold.
- Reflections on the very act of writing in artistic practice.
- Textual scores: (performative) writings to be activated with the voice or the body.
- Intermediate dialogues: crossings between word, sound, movement and image.
- Poetics of thought: ways in which each discipline develops its own strategies of conceptualization through words.
References
Cixous, Hélène. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Zambrano, María. 1977. Claros del bosque. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
*Artista transdisciplinar, docente e investigadora de la voz, Marcia Cabrera despliega su práctica en los umbrales entre la música, la escritura y la escena expandida. Graduada en Educación Artística y con maestría Summa Cum Laude en Teatro y Artes Vivas, ha convertido la voz en un territorio de investigación y resistencia, desafiando jerarquías lingüísticas mediante una exploración multidimensional que cruza lo sonoro, lo textual y lo performativo. Desde la creación, integra escrituras expandidas, composición musical, poesía, traducción performativa y archivos sonoros, tejiendo propuestas que cuestionan estructuras de poder hegemónicas y coloniales, reinventan los lenguajes artísticos, interrogan los formatos escénicos y cultivan diálogos interdisciplinares, desde una mirada poética y política siempre en movimiento. Como pedagoga, desarrolla metodologías insurgentes que disuelven la dicotomía teoría-práctica, creando espacios donde la voz moviliza la imaginación y la palabra desvela su fugacidad, tensionando los límites entre lo escénico y lo sonoro. Actualmente labora como docente en la Maestría Interdisciplinar en Teatro y Artes Vivas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, donde despliega sus indagaciones en torno a la voz como fenómeno performativo, profundizando en sus resonancias políticas, corporalidades vibrátiles y potencias transformadoras.
To submit your article for the current call for papers 21-2 "Borderline writings: the word as artistic practice and the expanded body in writing", the article must be sent by registering on the OJS platform*. The journal only accepts articles within the thematic dossier calls.
*In case of problems to submit your article through the OJS platform, please send your application to the mail cuadernosmavae@javeriana.edu.co, attaching the requested documents.