Disertare

Moving beyond the negative connotations traditionally associated with desertion—abandonment, withdrawal, absence—the issue explores desertion as a generative act capable of opening new forms of life, solidarity, and resistance. Through references ranging from Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation to the radical ecological practices of biologist Simona Kossak and the philosophical reflections of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the text examines how contemporary crises—capitalist exhaustion, ecological collapse, war, and psychic suffering—have transformed retreat, refusal, and disidentification into potential strategies of survival and re-signification. The issue invites contributions addressing desertion in its visual, performative, art-historical, and intermedial manifestations, considering forms of ethical and political disengagement from institutions, normative structures, labor systems, family models, and dominant imaginaries. Rather than defining desertion as a fixed category, the project investigates its many possible translations across visual cultures and contemporary practices, asking how acts of stepping aside, refusing participation, or abandoning imposed identities may generate alternative communities, epistemologies, and modes of inhabiting the world.