becoming MONSTER

Close your eyes. Let your senses blur. Breathe. What do you feel when you encounter the words “becoming monster?” What might it mean for you to see yourself as a process of encountering between modes of sensing? Is there resistance, fear, confusion, a queasy sense of disorientation? Maybe there is a feeling of release or relief, limbs loosening, posture shifting.  Perhaps there’s excitement, a curious agitation or erotic stirring that you can’t quite name. Maybe it is the bewilderment of all at once.

Becoming Monster offered an ecology of spaces to feel, share, experiment and practice opening ourselves to the unknown, the unthinkable and unsayable. The aim of this encounter was not to identify or name monsters, nor to redraw hard lines around the right and the good. Becoming Monster was never meant to be a prescription to cure the world’s ills. It was an exploration into a different materiality of grief and care in a time of loss, a celebration of our failures to become, an invitation to reimagine, re-feel and re-intuit what else it might mean to be human beyond the carceral narratives of white modernity.

Becoming Monster was a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted by ten and a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike) in 2024. The event brought together over 800 people from around the planet to grieve the losses that come with living into the end-times AND to play with ideas of fabulation, imagination and questioning: what else might the human be in our crumbling, entangled, pulsating, animist world(s)? The event unfolded over Samhain, Halloween, All Souls Day and los Días de los Muertos, in a season associated with porosity between realms, celebrations of reunion between the living and the dead, congress with the underworld and the ancestors. There were nearly 50 experimental, practice-based online sessions offered; daily virtual spaces for integration and metabolization; around 20 in-person gatherings from Bangalore, India.. to Berlin, Germany… to Lake Atitlán, Guatemala; and two hybrid offerings of theater and ceremony. 

For a taste of the festival, peek at a clip from the Opening Ceremony (above), listen to the sounds of our collective monster in this sonic collage,  peruse a gallery of visual harvests from our time together (below). To learn more about the event in its entirety, visit the festival website.

Becoming Monster was less about populating a museum of predetermined expectations about what the monster is, and more about investigating the edges of the obvious, contesting the shape of experience, and entertaining if only for a while — an errant pattern, a line of feeling, a fugitive thought, or an alien perception. That’s what the ‘monster’ is: a reworking of perception, a bracketing of utility, and a cultivating of sanctuary so that these minor tremors in the poetics of our bodies can be hosted with emerging care.

To encounter the monstrous is a sensing – a bodily recognition beyond language – that the conditions of our humanness are more profoundly and transgressively indeterminate than the dominant stories of homo sapiens have led us to embody.

Becoming Monster was produced and co-created by Aerin Dunford (Core Team Lead), Krista Dragomer (Artistic Director), Pooja Kishinani (Core Team Schemer),  Clare Szalay Timbo (Project Manager), Inta Intiar (Volunteer Coordinator), Aimée Wilson (Curatorial Team), Nico Wolf (Curatorial Team), Trudy Titilayo Richards (Care Team Co-Lead) and Muna Al-Shekh (Care Team Co-Lead). We relied on the support of countless volunteers, Care Team members, the many incredible contributors, and our partners at Ecoversities, The Rooted Global Village, Science and Nonduality, School of Liminal Arts, You’re Going to Die, Institute for Natural Law, Good Grief Network, únashay, advaya, and the Post Growth Alliance.