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The COVID 19 crisis taught us so very much about hunger – literal, political and existential. ​

 

According to a report released in July 2023 by the World Health Organization, the global hunger crisis has reached new heights: "Over 122 million more people are facing hunger in the world since 2019 due to the pandemic and repeated weather shocks and conflicts." Supply chain disruptions were a widespread phenomenon during the global pandemic and its lockdowns, intensifying and expanding areas of existing food insecurity around the world.

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Beyond the literal and political state of world hunger, the existential hunger for connection, for compassion, for love was needed to combat the unparalleled culture of loneliness that took hold during the height of the pandemic. To stem this existential hunger, many of us have had to re-learn how to reach out to others and how to step out safely into the wider world, and return to a more active and external existence. This is the time to tell our communal survival stories, to memorialize our losses, and honor the ghosts who are more alive it seems now than ever.

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With this call, we invite your submissions for the Spring 2024 issue of Pendemics, the international arts and literary e-journal of the Global Quarantine Museum. 

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We are seeking visual art, poems and short-short stories or essays that explore the concept of hunger in the contexts of experiences during the height of the global Covid pandemic, as well as the physical, mental and spiritual hungers we are experiencing and processing in the pandemic's wake.