HAUS-A-REST is now accepting submissions for our next issue of the online zine and our Instagram gallery. We welcome work in any form—visual art, photography, digital media, collage, painting, sound pieces, video stills, poetry, essays, fragments of text, short fiction, experimental writing, and beyond. This issue’s theme is ACCUMULATION.

HAUS-A-REST  *** Open Call ***.for artists and writers

Issue 66 - Accumulation,

Deadline **14th November 2025***

This month, the theme is accumulation -  the constant gathering and acquiring of objects, memories and experiences.

Accumulation: Between Archive and Excess

Accumulation has long been a driving force in art, literature, and culture. To accumulate is to gather, layer, and preserve—but also to risk being overwhelmed.

Artists and writers have returned to this theme again and again, fascinated by the way repetition and excess can both illuminate and obscure meaning.

In art history, accumulation has been a method of critique and creation.

Arman, one of the key figures of Nouveau Réalisme, created his “accumulations” in the 1960s by encasing heaps of everyday objects—gas masks, clocks, toys—in resin or plexiglass, transforming consumer detritus into monuments of modern life.

Andy Warhol’s silkscreens repeated images of Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup cans until the aura of the original dissolved into commodity spectacle.

Yayoi Kusama’s obsessive dot patterns and installations, endlessly repeated, dissolve individuality into infinite excess.

Similarly, Hanne Darboven’s monumental wall works, made of calendars and handwritten sequences, embody time itself as a relentless accumulation of marks.

In literature, accumulation emerges as a stylistic technique: Gertrude Stein’s loops of repetition, James Joyce’s sprawling catalogues, and John Ashbery’s proliferating associations turn language into a living accumulation of sound, rhythm, and thought.

More recently, writers like Anne Carson and Ben Lerner have explored the layering of fragments, voices, and references as a form of accumulation that resists neat closure.

Yet accumulation also has a darker side. The obsessive drive to collect or preserve can tip into pathology.

Compulsive hoarding, now recognised as a psychological condition, exemplifies how the act of saving—originally protective or sentimental—can spiral into overwhelming excess, threatening the very space of life.

Artists such as Christian Boltanski and Song Dong (Waste Not, 2005) have staged this tension, presenting piles of clothes, objects, or personal effects as haunting monuments to memory, survival, and compulsion.

Accumulation also mirrors the digital age: endless feeds, data storage, image hoards, and archives without limit. Contemporary artists working online often grapple with the impossibility of curating or filtering the flood of material.

Accumulation becomes both the condition of creation and its critique.

At its core, accumulation asks vital questions:

When does collecting become obsession?

When does memory preservation become clutter?

How do artists navigate the line between archive and overload, ritual and compulsion, meaning and noise?

Accumulation is therefore not only an artistic strategy, but also a human one. It speaks to desire and anxiety, possession and loss, creativity and illness.

To accumulate is to leave a trace—but also to risk being buried under what we keep.

Please make sure your work reflects the theme and has context.

Submission Guidelines:

• Send up to 5 works (images, texts, or both).
• Texts can be short or long: poetry, essays, micro-texts, or experimental writing, all welcome.
• Please include your name, a short bio, and (if applicable).
• *** Artists, you must have an Instagram handle AND at least three lines of context,
• An artist's website is optional. 

Selected works will be published on our Instagram gallery [@haus.a.rest] and in our upcoming online zine www.haus-a-rest.com and across our social media.

Good Luck.