What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?

The Emergence Network is a research inquiry into the otherwise.

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We are a constellation of humans and nonhumans working together trans-locally to curate projects, rituals, conversations and events that nurture senses of the otherwise via practices that trouble the traditional boundaries of agency and possibility.

We seek to shock outmoded modes of perception and action. We want to show how human bodies are changing, how whales and discarded pieces of gum are also ‘activists’, how remembering ancestry has political consequences, how thought is not a human feature, how bodies secrete time, and how slowing down in times of urgency makes sense in specific circumstances – especially now.

The Emergence Network surfaces at a time when there seems to be a felt need for ‘alternative’ modes of engaging with our more troubling realities. What we offer are ways of diving into the cracks in our skins, processes that allow us notice that there are other items on the menu. That there are other places of power.

Art by:
David Scott Myers
@red_wizard_collage
Our work is to make more room available for movement – to emancipate action and responsiveness from its narrow humanist confines. Our approach takes for granted the fact that humans can no longer be centralized in our conceptions of change – and that, instead, we must begin to take into consideration the eco-cultural environments that are the conditions for our acting.
Our work is to facilitate conversations, curate assemblies, foster trans-disciplinary and trans-professional interactions, convene events that mobilize people into exploring the occluded and the invisible, and nurture regenerative practices that allow for other compelling questions and values to be articulated in the face of crisis.

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Mushroom is our newsletter keeping you in touch with what is unfolding with The Emergence Network, the state of our projects, and essays and stories from the edges. Sign up to join us on our adventures to the otherwise.

A Compelling Call to Action:

The times we abide in invite us to notice our usual patterns of responding to the world around us. Our curators are artists who understand that the ways we frame our problems are often the problem. We seek to act as ‘death doulas’ of the familiar, to help open up new modes of perception, engagement and responsiveness in a time of crisis. With your support, we are creating a broad coalition of ‘postactivists’ who are listening to the troubling call for other ways of acting with the world.
Please support TEN and our project curators to open up places of power in these times.
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Events & Announcements:

The Emergence Network Goes Underground


MARCH - NOVEMBER 2021
Everywhere

We have been listening deeply to one another and to what this network is longing for now. Based on what we’ve heard, we have decided to let The Emergence Network take a prolonged rest. The decision emerged from a quiet and gentle conviction that 2021 might be our most prolific year yet.

This is a time for breathing, for sighing, for allowing this entity that is The Emergence Network to visit us in ways that may have been prohibited because of the logic of business-as-usual. This is a surrender away from the ‘what now, what next’ momentum, the looking outwards. 


It will not be a time of total inactivity. Many projects already have lives of their own in the world, and there is important quiet work to be done underground, in the root-system during this time. Yet, it is unlikely that we will launch new programs nor engage in any collective visioning or strategy work this year. Whatever seeds have been planted from our work in 2020, we will let rest in the soil. We will listen for what might want to vision us.

Vulture: A Wake

september 5 - 9, 2021
Residential Dartington Estate, Totnes, UK

These are times to let our knowings die, to devour our certainties, to surrender to trouble as a generative act. Vulture Wakes are opportunities to observe, gather around and get intimate with the practices of modernity that have been causing troubles. 

 

This 5-day residency is a call to artists, researchers, community leaders and facilitators to gather. An invitation to turn and face the inescapable themes of breakdown and demise that now confront us, and to listen for what might be wanting to emerge. Embodied and experimental, Vulture is an ongoing research project from The Emergence Network that takes the movements and participation of these great birds as metaphor, score and research modality. Vulture: A Wake is part of the larger convergence Borrowed Time: On Death, Dying and Change.

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Curator:
Toni Spencer

Projects:

While the central structures of The Emergence Network are resting this year, the projects continue to grow and learn in the world.

steal a way

fellowship - fugitivity - shabBat - sanctuary

Vulture

Courting the Other/wise in a Time of Breakdown

Kairos

We are in this Together

Vunja

Indaba for the Otherwise
View Projects