Impacts sts7crack
An impact crater on one of the windows of the Space Shuttle Challenger following a collision with a micrometeoroid during STS-7. Credit: NASA.

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So in purpleblack conscience of the quite empty blue sky

I figured an airplane collision. The lakes not looked at,

picking up cobalt, left their rock, ripple morphed to missile …

… direct, the hit

I’d feared, which would see me running out of myself …

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The above is an excerpt from Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Calling Time’, which is what we are doing here, calling time on our stint here with our final editorial note Collisions: running out of ourselves. Our work at MAP has been somewhat situated in the purpleblack sky, contact, space, stars, moons and revolutions we have seen; our residency operating as some sort of incipient mechanical gear, floating through hitherto unknown space observing, interacting, documenting, learning, making contact and colliding with… This journey was set against a ‘United Kingdom’ in the throes of collapse; in Capildeo’s 2013 work it was on the verge, and much has changed since we started working in January.

We finish this cosmic metaphor—originally set out as a ‘space’ in which to explore relations—with our last point of direct contact with you, our reader. Our orbit—of this place, this MAP—edges off the paper, the functions and funding of our satellite begin to dwindle, our research mission, this fledgling and continuing collaboration, disappears into dark matter. With our last fuel cell for now, we co-pilots look back, reflect and plunge into the future, blasters on.

Each artist or writer has become an asteroid, space station, a point of observation from which to describe or orchestrate some thought, or research, some potential collision of ideas and energy. We were grateful in the nothingness of everything for each on-coming object.

Impacts solarmax hole
View of an orbital debris hole made in the panel of the Solar Max experiment. Credit: NASA.

We think of Elizabeth Grosz’s description of intertextuality, where texts act as: ‘little bombs that, when they do not explode in one’s face (as bombs are inclined to do), scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new align-ments without necessarily destroying them.’ [2]

Entities to collide with, become sites of interconnectivity, destroying the idea of the discrete individual in a time of collaborative and collective breakdown and resurgence. These collisions sustain the movement of an idea, in this case the momentum and purpose of an online publishing project during a time of global crisis.

Collisions seem at first something to be afraid of, a negative concept, but what about when ~ two [or more] worlds collide ~ ushering in an unsuspected outcome: love, friendship, critique, protoplanets, a new moon, life on earth or terraformed futures elsewhere, we can see them as part of an ongoing process.

Secondly, we think of collision as a means of disruption—the idea of ‘the end of the world’, or the end of the world as we (have) know(n) it, holds a positive power. In abolitionist thinking, ‘the end’ is a necessary modality for radical change. This is evident when colliding with, or against, an institution, a system, a state. Collision is a method of protest, of refusal: ‘I will not let you continue in this direction—I stand in your way.’

Like our cosmic companions we hope the output of this collaboration burns bright before the end. As the upcoming articles head out on their journeys, meteorites, shuttles and far-flung matter, we hope they can create new linkages for those who find them.

We look forward to introducing a collaboration with The Scottish BAME Writers Network—artist, writer and researcher Camara Taylor is curating a series of articles for MAP that look at ‘the cold’ in its various registers and realities.

We continue our trajectory through dance and movement practices in Through Motion, with upcoming work from Saoirse Amira Anis and a conversation between Adam Benmakhlouf and Christian Noelle Charles. We host a constellational response by A+E Collective to ‘The Wild Book of Inventions’ (Sternberg Press), completing a series of reflections and responses with Adjoa Armah’s ‘And the tears came’, and Naomi Gessesse’s ‘Field Notes’ from Glasgow Short Film Festival.

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It’s been emotional, thank you for indulging us and our literary-cinematic-space-time continuum xxxx from the Kuiper Belt and beyond

Alison and Rosie

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Film AGDO dtop 5
A Grand Day Out, directed, co-written, animated by Nick Park at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and Aardman Animations, Bristol, 1989

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[1] Vahni Capildeo, ‘Calling Time’ in ‘Utter’, Peepal Tree Press, 2013

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Architecture From The Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space’, (MIT Press, 2001) p58