on site review 49 watery edges
call for articles
A small watercolour by Constable’s son, long attributed to Constable, but no longer. Whatever, it is a lovely thing where the shore between sky and water is full of human activity: ships under sail, steam ships, people.
Blue humanities : the human relationship with oceans, rivers, lakes and seas, now recognised as one of the important foundations of civilisation. One of the aspects of the ancient infrastructure of the shoreline is as a site of war and trade. Does the human relationship to oceans, rivers, lakes and seas still embody that interstitial condition, commanded by weather, by hinterlands, by tides and maritime vessels? The dock, the pier, the container port, the sandy beach: these are all constructions that mediate between water and land, war and trade. Migratory routes transcend borders, only registering at frontiers: a border crossing is a metaphorical landing site. It can be open or policed, marked by reefs, by walls, by surveillance as humans cross from one state to another, from land to sea; sea to land. These borders are marked by mangrove swamps, seaweed and kelps, reefs of coral and shipwrecks, by crumbling cliffs, by beach encampments. Spaces that do not always cohere; under many kinds of threat, they are as fragmentary and elusive as the camps of Achilles.
For On Site review 49 , we would like to look at the architectures of those watery frontiers This is clearly a wide, global condition with extremely local built infrastructure. Can, for example, one write about a container port in terms of its landscape, its form, its ultimate relationship to the size of its hinterland both on land and ocean? A deciding factor in the WWII turning of the tide was the Allied landings on D-Day across a number of beaches in Normandy, not ports, but seaside towns. Corniches, promenades, embankments — these are the fronts of cities: the seawalls that defend from tides and armies. If, as we are told, the future of battle is drone warfare, why are great flotillas of warships and aircraft carriers amassed in the Caribbean, the South China Sea? The more you think about this thin but potent edge condition, the more examples one can find.
We would like proposals for articles, essays, photo-essays, prose and poetry, drawings and ideas for On Site review 49 by June 1 2026. Please outline your subject, how you might treat it, illustrate it and format it. There is a page of specifications here: https://www.onsitereview.ca/specs for proposals and final submissions; do read it, as it gives a direction to how you might think about a submission to On Site review . For proposals, please use the contact-us form: https://www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us This form does not take images. Its purpose is for you to send a description of what you would like to eventually submit. We will reply by email, INSTANTLY. If you don’t hear from us, we didn’t get it. Try again please. Final submissions will be due July 15, 2026.
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