Open Call
Optimise Me — Issue 04
For the fourth issue of Lassitude, Optimise Me, we invite artists, writers, and critics to explore idealised states of health and the contemporary pursuit of wellness.
We are interested in wellness as aspiration and industry: a promise of transformation and longevity that increasingly shapes how we understand our bodies and ourselves.
What happens to care when health becomes a commodity—when optimisation is offered through supplements, diagnostics, biohacking clinics, and enhancement technologies? When longevity is marketed as lifestyle, and recovery becomes something to measure, manage, or improve?
Approaching these questions through a lens of lassitude, Optimise Me looks toward the dreamlike, surreal, and contradictory dimensions of wellness culture.
We are interested in:
- the disappearance of “enough” within cultures of optimisation
- wellness as identity, performance, and aspiration
- surveillance of the body through data and self-tracking
- blurred boundaries between healthcare and consumer experience
- fatigue, limitation, and dependency within systems of optimisation
- rest, recovery, and altered states of attention
We invite work that engages with fatigued dreams, bodily maintenance, healing rituals, enhancement, and the aesthetics of health. What is lost when rest, recovery, and wellbeing become things to optimise rather than experiences to inhabit?
Rather than a fixed destination, wellness is treated here as a shifting cultural field—shaped by markets, technologies, and desire.
Submissions
We welcome visual art, photography, essays, poetry, experimental writing, research-based work, and hybrid forms.
Send:
- submission
- short bio (50–100 words)
- links / supporting materials (optional)
Deadline: 6 July 2026