Seasonal Festivals
[cyclical translocal gatherings]
These times call for something else, something beyond the pedagogical, something beyond conceptual ‘understanding’ (as desperately needed that is and continues to be). When we think about stranger solidarities, becoming-black, the affordances of white syncopation, the aesthetic of losing one’s way, we are gesturing towards a pragmatic thing, a ‘village’ of practices. A village of technologies. ten’s Seasonal Festivals are a going-down-under, a descending-together, a tracing-in-accompaniment, an artistic trans-locality that disrupts the liberalist logic that seems out of sorts, and quite unable to continue to host the streaming tensions that surfacing from the order of the independent self.
As white stability flails and thins out, we’ll need dense networks of care that invite digital animisms, corporeal celebrations, eating together, sensing together – an unnameable aesthetic irreducible to a single method. The festival seems to be one modality of accompaniment – to shores and to new horizons – that we could use more of.
Once or twice a year, the ten body is midwife to an exploratory happening in the realm of postactivism and sanctuary-making. These may be virtual affairs: experimental ways of gathering online to celebrate, play, and become undone together; they may be translocal gatherings occuring regionally in several places at the same time; or perhaps asynchronous gatherings across a longer period of time, culminating with virtual harvesting, sharing and weaving. Or they may be larger face-to-face happenings in a single place and time.