Surfacing: Immesh’s first issue out now
Image by A Agar
Prompt One - Surfacing
The act of surfacing is transitory. It describes the movement from one layer of composition to another. When a cicada breaks free of the soil and enters the world of air, or when a whale breaks the bonds of water molecules and rises into the sky, they are exiting old worlds and entering new ones.
Something that once lay hidden, obscured from our view, is now fully in force in the world we're exposed to and demanding our attention. It is nearly impossible to look away from something that is surfacing. You are witnessing the exposure of this transition from one world to the next, and it is something to behold.
To surface is to emerge into new ecologies and entanglements different from those beneath. Surfacing helps us bring to light all the ideas, things, feelings and thoughts that have always existed in some form, in another composition, with different bonds and entanglements, but only now come to exist as something different altogether through the forging of new bonds. We want to highlight the importance of this transition, of moving fluidly between worlds, for that is the task ahead.
Therefore, this prompt aids us in recognising alternative thinking on themes connected to ecology and climate change. With it, we seek to find the ground and the material in a bid to recognise the importance of the physical means by which we contribute and disseminate these ideas. We want to show how our ideas and inspirations are entangled with others in our environment and offer how this concept can be used on a larger scale in relation to world ecologies.
A poem about a worm's journey as it surfaces from the soil joins an essay about near-death experiences and what they can do for the politics of an expanded nature. A film analysis of how a regional textile economy surfaced in a small town complements an interview with Jan White, an early childhood educator, who discusses the importance of outdoor surfaces in early childhood development.
In a time of uncertainty, new things will always begin to surface.
Immesh Magazine Prompt 1 is launching 16 January 2025