our mission

decomp – to repurpose the salvage:

decomp is a journal dedicated to dismantling and breaking down, the act of composition into its constituting parts. 

We traffic in ideas of social justice by publishing the works of a creative avante garde. We don't seek to hold reverence for an easily spotlighted, state-curated history of ourselves. We want to explore what it means to be marginalized within “the creative.” When the powerful and necessary act of writing the self has become consumable and isolating, we hold room for both rage and joy. We dare to be silly, to play with the discarded, the frivolous, whatever has fallen into disuse. We seek ways to recognize and reciprocate without consuming each other. 

We take up the fight of being “anti” (anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchal) through creating art that resists the injustices outside and inside ourselves and our communities. We seek to explore, interrogate, and think beyond spatial and temporal boundaries as well as the binaries of local vs global and inner vs outer. We acknowledge that solidarity that refuses borders and boundaries has always existed. The creative tools handed down to us, the instruments of resistance, have not been forgotten. They have only undergone decomposition. Rather than uplift isolating notions of community and struggle, we are committed to understanding the connections among structural forms of domination. 

We recognize that reform does not equal justice, nor does a journal’s mission statement itself equal the constant radical practice that rethinks what art is, how it is valued, and by whom. When the majority begins to depart the anti-racist train, those who embody race will remain aboard. decomp is for those who keep moving. We believe justice means systemic upheaval and decolonization. decomp endeavours to cultivate the practice of solidarity while holding the tension of being and thinking beside others, enabled by communal and political difference.