Call for statements of interest for contributions to a series of thematic pamphlets on Walter Benjamin’s he Arcades Project ~~ https://arcadematerials.tumblr.com/ To be edited by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor, & designed by Sophie Carapetian In 1927 Walter Benjamin began taking notes for an essay entitled “Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland”. Soon the material became unwieldy, his note cards and papers piled up, and he began arranging his sheaves of notes into ‘Convolutes’ on various themes, episodes and figures. he project was never finished. Bundles of fragmentary citations, images and reflections were gathered together and published posthumously – the resulting book remains unsynthesised, labyrinthine, contradictory, open-ended. We are looking for writing or visual responses to he Arcades Project that magnify overlooked fragments, reshule material to create new constellations, highlight absences, excavate forgotten figures and movements, explore marginalised and muted histories; that collide with the present moment ‘to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been’ (Convolute K). Irreverent, experimental, politically-engaged and critical of hagiography, contributions could be short or long form, scholarly or impressionistic, philosophical or subjective, dense essays or sketchy diagrams, vignettes or drawings, somber tracts or playful polemics. We hope to include work by writers and artists from diferent fields and disciplines; pieces by those new to Benjamin’s work alongside work by established Benjaminians. We are proposing to design each pamphlet around a diferent colour, to print 100 copies of each, and to post PDFs online, releasing them intermittently so that they might eventually form a kind of ‘magical encyclopaedia’ (Convolute H), or a ‘library where the books have melted into one another and the titles have faded away’ (Convolute K). Potential themes: TEXT/FORM: filing, archiving, symbols, montage, rearrangements, etc. HISTORY/HISTORIOGRAPHY: primal history, fashion, progress, catastrophe, dreams, etc. OBJECTS: coins, shells, umbrellas, fountains, maps, etc. ECONOMY: money, value, infrastructure, crisis, profit, commodity, labour, etc. FIGURES: Historical figures including those central to he Arcades Projects (Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, Baron Haussmann, Victor Hugo, etc), those