becoming
MONSTER
A Convening at the End of the Human
Online and In Person, October 30th - November 3rd, 2024
(hosted by TEN in collaboration with School of Liminal Arts, Unashay & Facilitators from around the Globe)
becoming -
The process of coming to be something or of passing into a state.
[Oxford English Dictionary]
MONSTER -
A zone of encounter between neurotypical modes of sensing the world and a ‘world’ – errant, fugitive, and excessive – that spills beyond our languages, our grammars of the body, and our practices of representation.
[Báyò Akómoláfé]
all artwork by Krista Dragomer (see bio and contact below)
Becoming Monster is a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted by ten(The Emergence Network) and a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike) from around the planet. This event is a space held for grieving the losses that come with living into the end-times AND playing with ideas of fabulation, imagination and questioning: what else might the human be in our crumbling, entangled, pulsating, animist world(s).
This festival will take place October 30th – November 3rd, 2024 in a season associated with a porosity between realms, celebrations of reunion between the living and the dead, congress with the underworld and the ancestors. There will be a schedule of online offerings, as well as self-organized in-person gatherings and events in different places around the world. This will be a highly participatory experience shaped and in-bodied by those who make offerings during our time together. Modes of inquiry and praxis may include making art together, engaging in ritual and ceremony, and opening space for heart / body / instinct-centered practices.
In this season and spirit, we invite you to join us in our humble and audacious attempts to…
co-create collective spaces for honoring, exploring and accompanying processes of dying, decomposition, descent, transmogrification, and grief
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initiate rituals for ‘coming undone’ and unraveling together
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practice embracing descent and sit with fears of losing the comforts and securities promised by modernity
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journey beyond the limits of belonging and citizenship during the so-called anthropocene
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feed our minds, bodies, spirits, and souls while we feel into these unsettled spaces
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find places of celebration and communing amidst the grieving and questioning.
Schedule of Events
These Online and In Person Events are Happening in New Mexico as hosted by TEN in Kinship w/ School of Liminal Arts & Unashay
TEN x School of Liminal Arts & Unashay
Saturday 10/26
4-6pm In-Person
Noria Grief Café at Unáshay Grief Sanctuary in Abiquiu with Aimee Wilson & Nico Wolf
(RSVP: inquiries@unashayhome.com )
Wednesday 10/30
8-9:30am MT ONLINE
becoming Monster Opening Ceremony:
Báyò Akómoláfé, Aerin Dunford, Krista Dragomer, Nico Wolf, Vex, Aimee Wilson & Pooja Kishinani
2-4pm ONLINE
Noria Grief Café with Aimee Wilson & Nico Wolf
6-8pm In-Person*
Opening Ceremony for In-Person Santa Fe Events with Laura
Thursday 10/31
TBA
Friday 11/1 (In-Person Social Inquiry Immersion)
12:45-3:15pm In-Person*
Sophie Strand and David Abram’s Becoming Bodily Screening
& Conversation/Integration & Exploration with Hallie Dalsimer
at ICA Santa Fe
1-2:15pm MT ONLINE
Becoming Bodily: a conversation with Sophie Strand & David Abram
hosted by Krista Dragomer & Nico Wolf
6:30pm - 8pm In-Person*
Shadow Dance Ritual with Nico Wolf
at Railyard Performance Center
registration required, limited spots
Saturday 11/2 (in person Social Inquiry Immersion)
10am - 12pm In-Person*
Meditative Movement & Voice for Monstering with Deirdre Morris
at ICA Santa Fe
12:30-2pm In Person*
Monster Song with Te Martin
at ICA Santa Fe
8pm In-Person
Day of the Dead Procession & Aztec Prayer
at the Plaza
(non-affiliated, recommended event featuring the puppetry work of Jo Christian)
Sunday 11/3
Closing Ritual Land Offering
*details below for the In-Person Immersion hosted by School of Liminal Arts.
Register for our in-person Santa Fe events here.
About Our In-Person Santa Fe Immersion…
Homage to the Dying World and the Pageantry of the Monstrous:
An Immersive Incubation of Exploring Monstrosities
Through the sensorium of the singular and collective body, we move through the alchemical practice of Solve et Coagula - the process of dissolving and coming back together as something Other. We claim the monstrous as the welcomed transversal disruption of worldview and the decay of positionality via an exploration of the porosity of identity. Through this immersion, we come to thresh the materiality, the dross of the breakdown, and celebrate the detritus of these times as the ubiquitous, hungry compost it is. By decentralizing the human and reclaiming the integrated animist lens, we seek to reach trance states through work with the breath and body and rewild concepts of the singular body to instead presence the superorganism of the collective soma as we reimagine the social ecosystems of seen and unseen worlds coalescing. Emergent, creative expression and bold curiosity invite us to open to all that is hiding in the Dark - calling it out from the closet, from under the bed, from the cracks and into the center as we gather together, mingled, tangled in the threshold place of wonder and awe.
This multi day immersion will be facilitated by several local practitioners and artists and will serve as the fertile soil that will seed the first steps in a longer process of creating the following social art piece and immersive ritual offering to the broader community:
We begin with a public funeral procession - an homage to the dying world. Participants work with the Unseen world in embodied ways to find visions of what deaths they'll be honoring (ie. dying forests, oceans, whales, and also thought forms, politics, worldviews) and, in just one day, craft effigies of what they'll be walking in the procession with. Then, we take these effigies apart, breaking them down into pieces, and, over the process of several months, work with the process of death and rebirth or the alchemical process of solve et coagula. Through this process, the pieces of these effigies and visual art pieces get recombined and put together into monstrous new formations (forests patchworked with capitalism, oceans combined with political parties etc) and, at the closing of our exploratory container, are brought back out as a Pageantry of the Monstrous as led by the feral children. Through performance art, the telling of future stories and maybe even a good ole dance party at the edge of the Earth, we celebrate the monsters of these times, the abundant not-knowing, the absurd - not as an arrival but in recognition of the being with what is.
Facilitated by:
Nico Wolf, Laura May PJ, Deirdre Morris, Hallie Dalsimer, Tracee Stanley, and Jaye Marolla. Jo Christian and other artists to join for our social art piece. Reach out if you’re interested.
Register to join us here.
PRESENTERS & CO-CONSPIRATORS OF THE MONSTROUS
Nico Wolf
Facilitator/Practitioner/ Transdisciplinary Artist / Santa Fe Organizer
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Nico Wolf (Nicole Haciba Burke) is a healing practitioner, trans-disciplinary artist, writer, guide, regenerative farmer, beekeeper and facilitator of dreamwork, ceremony, and animistic practice. Her work incites rebellion against the status quo and invites fellow humans toward endless curiosity, courageous authenticity, compassion, and connectivity. Nico’s diverse background and multi-faceted worldview has inspired her to create spaces that elicit a deep sense of anything-goes-ness, belonging and freedom where the full palate of human expression and creative impulse comes to the surface. Through her group and private sessions, she ushers participants towards the transformation that can occur when finding oneself in unexpected and non-dual realities. Nico has over two decades of experience as a practitioner and facilitator and has co founded both Golden Well Sanctuary (a retreat and regenerative farm 2012-2020) as well as School of Liminal Arts (2020 - current).
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Báyò Akómoláfé
Writer / Speaker / Public intellectual / TEN founder
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Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. But when he takes himself less seriously, he is a father to Alethea and Kyah, and the grateful life-partner to Ej as well as the sworn washer of nightly archives of dishes. Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.” Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent. In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.
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Aerin Dunford
Lead Weaver at TEN / Writer / Artist
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Aerin is the Lead Weaver at ten (@the_emergence_network ) working to cultivate the ground for experiments and practice around the notion of postactivism and asking poignant questions about the way that human response to the crises we face often reproduce the very conditions that have led to those crises. Since the death and stillbirth of her son in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together; learn more about her griefwork on her personal blog, In the Name of Rafa.
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info@emergencenetwork.org
Krista Dragomer
TEN Artist in Residence
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Becoming Monster Artistic Director Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working in visual art, text, and sound, often in collaboration with new media artists, musicians, writers, speakers and researchers in the fields of religion, philosophy, anthropology, biology and cultural studies. In symbiosis with her artwork is her teaching practice, Drawing on the Senses (DOTS). Krista is interested in the ways that sensory encounters with art can offer different approaches to public thought and has presented her art and workshops in academic conferences, art and science museums, concert venues, public parks, storefronts, DIY artist-run spaces, podcasts, and galleries. She is the 2024 Artist-in-Residence for Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s global postactivism project “We Will Dance With Mountains” and a collaborator with The Emergence Network. A short list of recent exhibitions and conferences include: the ICA Boston, Prix Ars Electronica where Krista received the 2021 Award of Distinction in Digital Musics & Sound for her work with Rashin Fahandej, Machines in Between: An Immersive Online Audio Program curated by Dr. John Modern, After Earth: Religion and Technology on a Changing Planet, put on by the International Society for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture. Krista has co-curated several of Dr. Eben Kirksey’s Multispecies Salon exhibitions and programs centering the intersection of art, research, and activism in local and global responses to the global climate crisis. A selection of her drawings is included in Dr. Beatrice Marovich’s “Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying” published by Columbia University Press, 2023 and she recently collaborated with For The Wild on their forthcoming anthology, expected spring 2025.
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Sophie Strand
Author / Neo-troubadour Animist
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Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and the memoir The Body is a Doorway along with numerous essays and poems. You can follow her work at sophiestrand.substack.com and @cosmogyny on Instagram.
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sophiestrand.substack.com and @cosmogyny on Instagram.
David Abram
Author / Cultural Ecologist / Geophilosopher
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David Abram, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. He was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a renewal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview, catalyzing a vital reassessment now underway in many disciplines. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David's work continues to explore the ways in which sensory experience, language, and wonder inform the encounter between the human animal and the animate earth. He spends an inordinate amount of his time in a state of astonishment, befuddled by the polymorphic strangeness of the world.
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Aimee Wilson
Executive Director at Unashay Grief Sanctuary
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Aimee Wilson (they/ them) is visionary architect, executive director and steward of Únashay Sanctuary. Music is their primary language, having written, performed and recorded two albums. They have served under many roles, as musician, singer, writer, social worker, organizer and fundraiser for houseless women/ queer community in Philadelphia, waitress, group facilitator and more. After much intimate experience with loss, and decades of work within a system that doesn’t take care of the grieving, Aimee was moved to summon Únashay. They dwell in New Mexico with wolf kin and chosen family, tending the sanctuary and writing music.
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Contact: aimee@unashayhome.com
Deirdre Morris
Interdisciplinary Artist / Educator / Director
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Deirdre Morris (MFA UCDavis, LMT, RYT) Deirdre is an interdisciplinary site responsive installation and performing artist, educator, and director. She is the former Executive Director of Earthdance Creative Living Project, Managing Director of Dancing Earth Creations, Artistic and Managing Director of Wise Fool New Mexico. Deirdre currently Co-produces and Curates the LACE Symposium @ImpulsTanz, as well as directs her own project, ‘The Forgotten Body Remembers’.
Deirdre’s artistic research explores the relationship between organic world & animist culture, manmade structures & ideas, and the stories & desires we place upon them. Most recently in a series of short films, installations, & associated workshops: Land/Tree/Sky/Window, with collaborative partner Esther Baker Tarpaga and Propelled Animals. And, ‘Mapping the Feminine’ at The Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM, and the Impulstanz Symposium on Dance and Other Contemporary Practices in Vienna Austria. Deirdre is interested in mobilizing audience agency - through interaction, unconventional uses of space, and by presenting work open enough for the audience to enter with their own reflections and stories. ‘My work steers away from making statements. I don’t have any answers. I ask questions, open doors, hold mirrors, create relationships. I seek to complicate, exacerbate, and occasionally offer balm.’
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Deirdre C Morris MFA LMT RYT 200
2024 Curator, LACE#2 ImpulsTanz Symposium on Dance and Other Contemporary Practices
The Forgotten Body Remembers Arts Consulting, Founder/Director
Jo Christian
Actionist, Organizer, and Visual & Performing artist
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Jo Christian is an actionist, organizer, and visual and performing artist focused on building radical imagination through hands-on community engagement.
They co-founded and directed Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, San Francisco Street Theater Festival, and Wise Fool New Mexico. Over the past 35 years, Jo has led over 100 community groups of diverse ages and backgrounds through the experience of visioning, storyboarding, building and performing giant puppet and physical theater to raise their collective voices on the issues that are closest to their hearts. Jo currently resides on Tewa land in O’Gah P’Ogeh (Santa Fe, NM) where they continue to create and support action, movement, and arts experiences as a means of inspiring connection, celebration and emergent futures.
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Pooja Kishinani
TEN Program Coordinator
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Pooja Kishinani is a wanderer, dreamer, and writer based in India. She holds a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and is the co-author of ‘Student Guide to the Climate Crisis’. She has worked with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the RSPB, Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, and Policy@Manchester on research projects and campaigns exploring the intersection of climate, economic, and social justice.
Since July 2023, Pooja has slowly drifted away from academic and policy circles, following her curiosities about the power of the collective imagination as a tool of resistance, co-liberation, and dreaming new worlds into being. She currently works at ten (The Emergence Network), an underground network of postactivist practitioners interested in exploring other ways of knowing, being, sensing, relating and responding to the crises of our time. She lives and breathes stories, and can almost always be found at her local library immersed in the wor(l)ds of Ursula K Le Guin or scribbling away in her notebook.
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Tracee Stanley
Author / Teacher of Tantric Practice
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Tracee Stanley is the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity and The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices & Rituals to Remember Who You Are (Shambhala Publications). Tracee is the founder of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community and portal of practices, rituals, and Tantric teachings inspired by more than 28 years of studentship in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan Masters. As a post lineage teacher, Tracee is devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence. Tracee holds certificates from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Advanced Eco-Therapy, New Thinking, Best Practices, and Emerging Modalities and a certificate in Advanced Ecopsychology. Tracee is gifted in illuminating the magic and power found in liminal space and weaving devotion and practice into daily life.
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Paul DuCoudray
Multidisciplinary Artist / Consultant
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Paul is a multi-disciplinary artist, born and raised in the Northwest. While visual art was the focus of his education, he continued on as a musician, composer, and designer for nearly 20 years. Returning to his first love, Paul currently lives and works as a painter in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Artist Statement
In our times, antidotes for uncertainty are offered everywhere, coaxing us out of the present — and therefore our bodies and their intelligence(s) — with promises of attainment, tolerable futures, and other things that sparkle. My work hopes to explore a more primordial relationship with our planet and all forms of life within and around us, where certainty and its legacies are a sideshow to the raw experience of living and dying well together.
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Laura May PJ
Production / Movement / Arts facilitation
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Laura May PJ, MDiv
I support folks moving through big life transitions (grief/loss/rebirth) and deepening their capacity for soulful living. I work in the fields of spiritual direction, intimacy coaching, bodywork, and movement/arts based ritual facilitation—pulling from lineages in Vajrayana Buddhism, Butoh, evolutionary astrology, and the Tamalpa Life/Art Process. These days I’m most resourced by deep-dive friendships, Yunnan tea, Dharma and swing dancing.
Becoming Monster inspires me to simply allow what already is monstrous, and makes space to play with creative engagement with parts of my being and the world that the dictatorial mind deems unfit. This experiment feels like an extension of so many of my favorite off-center refuges in life—using creative inquiry to explore modes of being that bring surprise, freedom, and new potentials I can’t even yet vision from my current frame.
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Paul DuCoudray
Multidisciplinary Artist / Consultant
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Te Martin is a song-keeper and ritual artist. They were born on Ramaytush Ohlone land in san francisco and have been shaped by Ocean, Redwoods, circus arts, and theater games. They facilitate oral tradition singing classes and workshops that focus on song as a tool for collective liberation, somatic regulation, and ancestral connection. Te served as co-organizer of Thrive Street Choir in the san francisco bay area for six years, is a student of the Irish bodhrán drum, released their first professional music video and EP of original songs, "Water & Bones", in 2021, and launched “Murmuration: A Sebastopol Community Choir” in northern california this past spring.
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Hallie Dalsimer
Dance Artist / Improvisation Teacher / DJ
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Hallie B Dalsimer (e/em/they/them) is a dance artist, improvisation teacher and DJ. E is dedicated to humaning with utmost care and showing up as fully as possible to the moment by moment unfolding of the mystery.
Hallie’s creative practice is rooted in a belief that inhabiting our bodies in real time — cultivating our capacity to acknowledge and feel what is — is a profoundly radical act of self-empowerment and a way to remember ourselves as part of a larger collective body.
Their work centers around this practice of grounding personal transformation in and through the body — reconnecting with our innate inner wisdom and cultivating a felt sense of the self as part of a larger whole — as a foundation for disentangling ourselves from the conditioning of systems of harm, in service to relational, collective and systemic change.
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More info: www.humaning.space
Luna Van Arsdale
Facilitator/ Event Production
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Luna came to her practice through studies of interior design, art history, meditation and religious studies. In considering how physical space may facilitate personal evolution, Luna's work experiments with sensory immersion and deprivation in relation to embodied experience. Whether these be temporary constructions or permanent artifacts, her goal is to create enveloping, holistic spaces that not only alter perception, but increase questioning of the known "self."
This consideration works in tandem with the inner world. From guiding journeys into our inner wilderness through story telling and meditation, to crafting altars to materialize our value system, to ceramics and paintings, to envisioning immersive sculptural spaces, to writings musings on embodied experiences, Luna's creative pulse is grounded in the exploratory process of making … and unmaking. -
Jaye Marolla
Somatics Facilitator/
Qi Gong / Body Work
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I am an educator, somatic practitioner and holistic bodyworker. I currently offer movement classes in Santa Fe and consult privately with groups, organizations and businesses offering somatic programs in person and online. My bodywork practice is here in Santa Fe, specializing in Thai Bodywork. My practices and outlook are deeply informed by living and traveling outside of the US. I spent significant years in Ghana, West Africa, China, Thailand, Central Asia, and England, studying and attuning to how other cultures express movement and approach their day to day lifestyle. In China and Thailand I began extensive study in healing and martial arts, and how the intertwining of the two branches originates from the same root. I became fascinated with lineage based practices and knowledge that travels tacitly through transmission and embodied nuance.
read more via jayemarolla.com
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Sarah Belpedio
Facilitator/ Event Production
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I curate experiences that facilitate radical transformation. I serve as a guide and friend, holding your hand as you move through life’s big transitions from death to divorce, career shifts to Saturn return. I support individuals in remembering the depths of their power as they move through some of life’s darkest moments. I leverage my embodied knowledge of human design to help people release conditioning and limiting beliefs at the cellular level and learn how to regenerate their life force energy to ground their dream world into form. I am passionate about supporting people in cultivating inner resources and self-knowledge to survive and thrive in our rapidly shifting world. My process empowers people to build the trust and resiliency that is necessary to surrender to their life’s purpose.
What inspires you about Becoming Monster: I love that we can gather together to hold space for discussions and explorations of the parts of being human that often don’t have space to be seen and acknowledged in our everyday lives.
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Chiara Giovando
Founder of ICA / Artist / Curator
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Chiara Giovando is an artist and curator. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her BFA studies and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Based in experimental music practices her work includes installation, performance and film. Giovando works with sound as a material, creating sculptural instances of sound that activate and disrupt psychoacoustic perception. Her films include, Proud Flesh (2008), This Love (2010), Archaic Smile (2011). She was Curator in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland OR, and led a full programatic year titled Sound is Matter, she was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A., where she organized several exhibitions of newly commissioned works. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated the exhibition Hammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included 14 artists and composers as well as archival material. She curated an exhibition of new sound art in Los Angeles titled, The Third Ear, as part of Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curator’s Lab Award. She was creator of the Sound Structures series in San Francisco that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to new graphic scores. In 2014 she founded Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program in Joshua Tree, CA.Giovando has performed both nationally and internationally.
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