CHROMATOSE : Invitation to Collaborate

A Collective Exquisite Corpse Novella (Texts & Images) for TROUBLE MAGAZINE

CHROMATOSE : Invitation to Collaborate

A Collective Exquisite Corpse Novella (Texts & Images)

MATTHEW ROSE

On Strike - Berlin 2005 - photograph - Cecil Touchon

Call for Writers and Artists – Contribute to CHROMATOSE

Hello there — writers, artists, visionaries: we invite you to take part in a potentially wild collaborative experiment.

CHROMATOSE is a surrealist exquisite corpse novella — a collective act of storytelling about revolution, desire, metamorphosis, and the desperate beauty of coming of age in chaotic times. Think of it as an unfolding dream stitched together from many minds, where each hand leaves its trace and no one knows quite where it leads.

The Project

Conceived by Trouble Magazine, CHROMATOSE extends our usual deep dives into art and culture into a long-form fiction — a fractured mirror held up to our gilded and gelded age. The story explores inner and outer revolutions, told through a protagonist who can become anyone or anything: young or old, human or not, divine or broken, blissfully lost or lucid to the bone.

Each contributor writes a short section (up to 1,000 words), continuing or twisting the story in any direction. There are no limits of style or genre — you might write a tragic monologue, a scientific memoir, a comic interlude, a lyric hallucination. The only rule: the narrative keeps moving forward, and the revolution — whatever that means to you — must pulse through it.

Visual artists are equally vital to the project. Submit analogue works only (drawing, painting, collage, photography — no AI), as 300 dpi JPGs in portrait format. Each image should be accompanied by one or two sentences that expand the narrative — think of it as a poetic caption advancing the story.

How to Participate

• Text: up to 1,000 words per submission, formatted as a “chapter.”

• Art: analogue only, 300 dpi JPG, portrait format (8 x 10 inches/ 20 x 25 cm). Include a short narrative cue.

• All contributors will be listed on a dedicated page.

• The finished work will be released as a free global PDF. Print copies will be available for sale; contributors receive digital editions.

• SEND TEXTS TO : MATTHEW.ROSE.PARIS at GMAIL dot COM

• SEND IMAGES TO : troublemagazine2025 at gmail dot COM

Collaboration

Collaboration is itself a form of revolt — an act of imagination against isolation and automation. CHROMATOSE invites you to help shape a living, breathing, ever-shifting story. If you’ve ever wanted to die on a hill for art, here’s the hill. Bring your fire.

WHAT IS CHROMATOSE?

CHROMATOSE is an exquisite corpse novella about revolution, written and drawn by dozens around the world. The “main character” is fluid — morphing between sexes, ages, bodies, and states of grace or decay. One writer may find them sewing a flag; another, dissecting a rose; another, fighting shadows in a war that might be real or remembered.

The protagonist is mercurial — transforming across submissions, through languages and sensibilities. They may be man or woman, saint or soldier, animal, cloud, god, or ghost — one moment dissecting a rose, the next removing a bullet, the next walking a dog before the world began to end. The world they move through folds and unfolds, as revolutions do: inward, outward, nowhere fixed.

There are no stylistic borders, no dictates of genre or morality. Tragedy may follow farce; a manifesto may melt into myth. What matters is motion — the narrative must proceed, however uncertainly, toward the restless promise of change.

There’s no single timeline or truth — just the recursive, collective dream of resistance and rebirth. Over time, the revolution reveals itself as both outward and inward: the struggle to fight the world, and the struggle to survive oneself.

Join us. Write a page. Paint a frame. Add your voice to the strange and beautiful rebellion of CHROMATOSE.

Please feel free to comment, ask questions, raise issues, protest, the whole shebang.

MATTHEW ROSE / EDITOR & PUBLISHER TROUBLE, The occasional quarterly art magazine, mostly about trouble.

JAMIE NEWTON / MANAGING EDITOR & DESIGNER TROUBLE