becoming
MONSTER
A Convening at the End of the Human
October 30th - November 3rd 2024
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]
Welcome to the Threshold
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.
Welcome to Becoming Monster, 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 introduced us to strange characters and other-than-human creatures, co-created in praxis through art-making, creative process, intuitive and body-based explorations, ritual, ceremony and celebration. Over 70 sessions (online, hybrid and in-person) were offered up by friends and kin of ten (The Emergence Network), but the experience was shaped by all who participated in a multiplicity of ways. All of our various parts, emotions, practices, life experiences, questions, doubts and longings were welcomed into the space of Becoming Monster.
Festival Details
Becoming Monster was 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. The event was 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). It happened between 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. You can learn about the many Becoming Monster offerings here and about the incredible community of contributors here. It was a highly participatory experience shaped and in-bodied by those who make offerings during our time together. Modes of inquiry and praxis included art-making, ritual & ceremony, and opening space for heart / body / instinct-centered practices. Our longing with this tender event was to…
co-create collective spaces for honoring, exploring and accompanying processes of dying, decomposition, descent, transmogrification, and grief
initiate rituals for ‘coming undone’ and unraveling together
practice embracing descent and sit with fears of losing the comforts and securities promised by modernity
journey beyond the limits of belonging and citizenship during the so-called anthropocene
feed our minds, bodies, spirits, and souls while we feel into these unsettled spaces
find places of celebration and communing amidst the grieving and questioning
becoming MONSTER Team
Aerin Dunford
Core Team Lead – aka Medusa
I have an inkling that, as humans, we are probably much more than we’ve been trained to believe… and, in some ways, also way less. I feel that there are some strange, unthinkable qualities of our beingness we find difficult to sense in the anesthetizing doldrums of these times. This possibility brings me unspeakable delight. Entwined with this joy, I feel a deep need to practice embracing death fully and making space for the complex mess of feelings that arise when facing the pain of loss and endings. I am learning how to live, hopefully with some grace, with grief and I long to open more spaces for others to do the same.
Pooja Kishinani
Core Team Schemer – aka Tumblin’ Totoro
I sense a deep longing for spaces that honour the dance between grief and care, death and life, love and loss; spaces that nurture us to explore what lies beyond the confines of the individual human subject and cultivate capacities to be with shapeshifting, language-defying monsters. What if monsters are an invitation to disrupt the sensibilities we are all too familiar with? How do we stay present and attuned to the more-than-human intelligences alive around us? How do we breathe life into impossible dreams in the midst of collapse, decay, and coming undone? I carry these questions and curiosities with the intention to seed them in a container – this festival filled with poetry, ritual, song, tears, and play.
Clare Szalay Timbo
Project Manager – aka Monster Mama Magoo
When my kids and I talk about monsters, I always ask myself who gave them that label? And what does it mean to live during monstrous times? These are the queries and questions I have that sought me to work with others to explore the edges of the unknown and seek out spaces to grieve, release, fall apart, and be with the more than human world. What drew me to this space was the intention to create containers to feel, deeply, and to slow down. And my excitement to celebrate a potent time of year with more intentionality and support from others, my ancestors, the earth and beyond.
Krista Dragomer
Artistic Director – aka the Intercessor
The monster, for me, is the wild unknown breathing unexpectedly in the corners of the familiar. It is a queering in the ecotones of abstraction and representation, a refusal to resolve into shape or blur into formlessness. My art practice is a being-with the monster, often visually expressed through the rendering of corporeal liminality; heads blossom into ecosystems, disordered limbs tangle and transform, figures become ground for strange forces of livingdying. To encounter the monster 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. I have collaborated on the creation of the Becoming Monster Festival to explore the practices that allow us to be with our becomings as we welcome the monster.
Nico Wolf
Curatorial Team – aka Octopus Monkey
Of the many paths and perspectives we might be tempted to take during these uncertain times, I wish to carve out spaces that allow us to release the path of denial. To be with the death and decay, the chaos and compost of it all, is also to recognize that there is still Life. I am interested in meeting Life in the process of transmutation that humanity seems to be deeply embedded in, yet largely in denial of. I’m interested in looking head on with a million eyes at what is, and dreaming with eyes that see beyond what is of form and into seed and future. I am interested in coaxing out and witnessing with body (and senses beyond body) the convergent timeline that can be braided through the honoring of the Unseen, the Wise Ones beyond the veil, the benevolent Dark, the feral children, the winged, the crawling, slithering, the Green beings, and all of the Monsters we’ve kept in closets and under beds who’ve been asking us to come dance wildly at the edge of the Earth so we might exhume the deeper passageways that connect us All.
Aimee Wilson
Curatorial Team – aka Flames
What we hold back in the world is often what is most needed for a real conversation. And too, we are complicated strange creatures… fractured by life’s experience, in need of things like skin, limits and discernment. I have always been moved by Alejandra Pizarnik’s line “When the roof tiles blow away from the house of language, and words no longer keep- that is when I speak.” I am interested in the point between these two worlds, of the raw expression of life (from the vantage point of death) and the need for skin. Such elemental moving in the world can be perceived as -monster- to any who feel ‘threat’ by this way. Who moves, who cries, whilst inside their skin? Who/ what is breaking through, for a closer, more terrifying experience? Destroying their reputation, as Rumi wrote, all for love of the beloved.
Inda Intiar
Volunteer Coordinator – aka Lembuswana
For me, transformation requires us to face the monsters within us as individuals, but also as parts of ecosystems that rely on each other to survive. The journey into the forest of monsters may be terrifying, yet the monstrous are a necessary mirror of the complexity and discomforting realities of our world. What could we become if we face the monstrous with curiosity? What if we allow the monsters to challenge us and teach us? How might we express these encounters so that we may carry the lessons? Perhaps leaning on to each other’s wisdom, knowledge, and practices could allow us to muster the courage to welcome a process of transformation.
Trudy Titilayo Richards
Care Team Co-Lead – aka Damballah Wedo
I am a grandmother at the center of the circle between my ancestors and descendants. Reaching back for the seeds of wisdom from those who came before us to plant and nurture in the hearts of our descendants, future stewards of our Earth. This initiatory journey called Life, is teaching me to move sideways, belly to the ground through challenging ripples of polarity, each serpentine movement a mantra: “Release, receive, renew.” Shedding and transforming in order to return Maat’s balance and harmony to Mother Earth and all her creation. In the spirit of Sankofa, I invoke the immortal will of timeless, primordial Nature, pulling the threads that intertwine birth and death… grace and magic… to meet the eternal return of the Sacred Now, with compassionate presence and reverence for all the mysteries of life, tail between teeth… where monsters meet. Will the circle be unbroken?
Muna Al-Sheikh
Care Team Co-Lead – aka الله أعلم
The above description in Arabic means: Allah only knows! That’s how I feel every time I enter this communal space: No clue! Into the fun unknown… full of exciting mystery… new education and connection… joy and awe. It is always a sweet state of bonding alienship here. I welcome futuristic forms of benevolent monsters to guide me forward in this world. At such times of chaos and necessity for radical recalibration of our senses, to become a monster – for me – is to truly feel deeper and reactivate lost intimacy with my body and wise humanity, which over generations has been numbed, oppressed and forgotten to convenience the new world. The monstrous state I wish to become or live in with my community is actually unlearning personal and collective conditioning. It is more like being in a state of raw feeling, deep listening and responding from ever-changing physical, emotional and spiritual spaces towards a kinder, softer – yet fiercely passionate – world, in which I envision myself to be more wisely response-able.
F.A.Q.
What was this?
Becoming Monster was a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components that took place from October 30th – November 3rd 2024. Becoming Monster came from a desire to open a space / place / portal when the veils are thin (Halloween, Samhain, Día de los Muertos, Todos Santos, All Souls Day) to engage in an ecology of practices, co-create ritual, experiment with embrace grief and celebration around death, dying, monsters, endings. There was art, ritual, sound, sensorial experiences, communing, grieving, celebrating, questioning, feeling, practices that fed our mind, body, spirit, and soul.
Why explore “becoming a monster”?
The creation of Becoming Monster Festival was predicated on the belief that we are living in a moment in which the veneer of white modernity is becoming increasingly brittle. That destabilization engenders encounters with the belief systems, ontologies and narratives that have shaped us in ways that we may not be conscious of or have felt but have struggled to articulate, communicate, or make sense of. The monster is a figure that speaks to our hybridity, that opens a space for us to recognize and feel into how we have shaped by modernity’s narratives and how we are also more than, other than, living in bodies and lives that can’t be described, represented, policed, or maintained by definitions of the “typical human” as it has been manufactured within the dominant systems of patriarchy, gender normativity, capitalism, neurotypicality and whiteness.
Why did you center grief and death?
Given the death- and grief-phobic overculture that we live in, alongside the relentless insistence on growth, success, productivity and perfection that are intrinsically woven into our ideas and experience of what it means to be human, we lack generative and collective spaces for honoring, exploring and experimenting with dying, death, decomposition, transmogrification, shapeshifting and grief.
Why not try to fix and/or get rid of the monsters in our world?
This was a space to explore what it means to be monstrous, while looking through a kaleidoscope to notice that monsters are all around us and always have been. It was a space to explore the messiness of being alive and accepting death and grief as part of life. It was therefore spacious enough to hold all forms of “becoming” and being “monsters”, without the need to “fix” or “heal” what is in us, part of us, beyond us and what we don’t fully understand.
Who is this for?
This festival welcomed and included everyone, including our other-than-human and more-than-human kin. It was a space of offerings that might appeal to those who are questioning the tenants of white modernity and values of late-stage capitalism and working with some of the monsters our times are beginning to make visible. It may have been particularly magnitizing for those working with death, grief, loss and mourning in ways that transcend modern taboos on these subjects. Becoming Monster attempted to serve the collective and questions the constricting limitations of hyper-individualism, so participating as a community or group was particularly enriching.
The following kinds of people (and many more) participated in Becoming Monster:
- People seeking spaces to grieve, connect and feel.
- People looking to experiment with online, hybrid and offline gatherings and practices and are willing to participate in the co-creation of these experiments.
- People longing to learn how to be in different kinds of relationships with each other, with death, grief and hospicing during these end-times.
- People engaging with practices of shapeshifting/intuitive work, art/ music/dance/culture creation and organizing, somatic practice, grief work, etc.
What is the structure for this event?
The event began with an Opening Ritual on Wednesday, October 30th. There were nearly 50 live online sessions between October 30th – November 2nd, distributed throughout different time slots and accommodating an international audience.
The online sessions were facilitated by different people who felt called to make an offering on the collective altar of Becoming Monster. Sessions did not happen at the same time each day. People came and went based on their schedules and their time zones. It was not expected, nor possible for participants to show up for all the offerings live. Some live sessions were recorded, others were not.
In addition to the live sessions facilitated by contributors, we offered twice-daily live sessions with creative and somatic practices to support the metabolization and transmografication of the experiences throughout the festival.
Becoming Monster also included several place-based, in-person gatherings, rituals and experiments over the course of the five days in different geographical locations around the world. Some of these were open to the public and others were private affairs, though we included all of the offerings on sessions webpage.
A couple of place-based hosts of in-person sessions also chose to include an online component to their events. These hybrid events invited in witnesses and observers via a camera and microphone on site.
Participants were also invited to connect and dialogue on the festival community platform before, during and after the festival. We had an online visual arts and sound gallery for people to contribute to and enjoy, in addition to daily prompts and questions for people to engage with.
The festival closed with an online celebration / ritual on Sunday, November 3rd and a “recovery room” virtual space for integration and processing of the experience.
Will this be a safe space?
While we deeply value participants’ emotional safety and well-being, we could not and did not promise safety. The space inclued many people with differening worldviews and backgrounds. Hopefully, these differences created the conditions for new insights, new dreamings, and new possibilities. We know that there is always the possibility that they could lead to conflict and fragmentation.
We relied on participants to use their discernment around when to prioritize their own safety and when to take risks and leap. Please check the Becoming Monster Community Guidelines for more information on our invitations around how to engage in this experience.
We had a Becoming Monster Care Team to support participants and contributors in the festival experiencing with challenging emotions or tensions with other participants, contributors or the material.
If this space involves ritual, what does that all entail?
Ritual, ceremony, and working with the elements and non-human entities of our world(s) means that these spaces can often be potent and mysterious… and may open portals or initiate connections with the “more-than” which we should be resourced to navigate and close well. We recognize that offerings which include rituals, ceremonies, magic, spiritual connection and evoke the living/dead beyond what we can see/feel/touch can be at times disturbing, painful, scary or intense. Intentionality is very important when setting a container, as is taking personal responsibility to be aware of your own self and experiences. We asked that participants who engaged in or hosted ritual or ceremony during Becoming Monster do everything possible to ensure that they had the knowledge, wisdom and resources to hold those spaces with exquisite care. We also asked that people do whatever was needed to close the rituals with intentionality and attention, so as to maintain the integrity of the collective spaces we co-created and to do whatever possible to prevent harm to those participating in these types of sessions.
We had a Care Team available for ongoing support throughout the festival. We also recommended and encouraged all participants to have a resource plan and attune to their needs (emotional, physical, mental, spiritual and more) regularly during the festival and choose to opt out, leave, take a break or no longer participate if any session(s) were beyond their capacity.
Where will this gathering be hosted?
The content for the online gathering was hosted on the Becoming Monster community platform on Hylo. Links to live Zoom sessions, Zoom recordings, and any other content was stored there. The Becoming Monster community platform also allowed participants to dialogue with each other through online forums.
In order to participate in the gathering, we asked that participants create an account on Hylo about one week before the start of the festival.
In-person events were announced at least three weeks prior to the festival on the Becoming Monster webpage.
Where is the physical gathering taking place?
There were multiple self-organized activities and gatherings which happened over the course of the five days. Some of these were open to the public and others were private affairs. We published all of the face-to-face gatherings on the Offerings page, along with information on their location and hosts. There was no large, centralized in-person Becoming Monster event.
What’s required of me to participate?
In addition to registering for the gathering and making an account on the Becoming Monster community platform, we asked participants to come with a willingness to try something that may be different, to cultivate an interest in putting down or loosening up notions of what they believe to be “right,” an ability to make sovereign choices around how to engage with this experiment, and a spirit of hospitality. Or simply – courage, curiosity, and humility.
Pillars of praxis for this gathering included making physical things and art together; engaging in ritual and ceremony (including the ritual of the celebration!); opening space for heart / body / instinct-centered practices that allow access to other ways of knowing. This was not be just another online conference with panels of so-called experts pontificating about the times we live in.
In order to participate in the virtual components of this gathering, participants needed a relatively strong internet connection.
In-person hosts were in touch with participants advance about anything required to participate in these gatherings, workshops or sessions.
Will this gathering be offered in languages besides English?
We created some language-specific groups on the Becoming Monster community platform for discussion and sharing. We provided information about how to create these groups when we sent out invitations to join that space about a week before the gathering.
We unfortunately did not have the capacity nor resources to provide language interpretation and translation throughout the entire program.
What if I can only participate in part of the gathering?
That was totally fine. People participated live in whatever they could and many watched the recordings later!
How much does it cost to register?
This festival was offered in the spirit of the gift culture. We had a range of suggested contribution amounts (between $5USD and $500USD) and no one was turned away due to lack of funds or access to a debit/credit card.
The funds raised went first towards meeting any financial requests of the Becoming Monster contributors and artists. All additional funds went towards supporting The Emergence Network’s work in 2025.
What is your refund policy?
We encouraged folks to sit with the “What this isn’t” and “What this isn’t” sections of this FAQ (below) to determine whether or not this event was for them. People who purchased a ticket and were not able to join, could request a full refund (minus administration fees) through October 28th. After this date, unfortunately, we were not able to refund any payments.
What this WAS NOT:
- An attempt to use the language of othering by saying certain people of things are “monstrous” in a negative way;
- A personal transformation workshop to make you into a better, more compassionate, more courageous person;
- An effort concerned with saving the planet or advancing human consciousness to a state of oneness or realizing social justice in a more evolved form as the end goal;
- A space designed to do the deep work of healing individual wounds and trauma;
- A meeting where we, the organizers, have project objectives and next steps to hand out at its conclusion.
What this WAS:
- An attempt to generate, provoke, inspire, unsettle, root, connect, and build wilder coalitions of kinship;
- An intentionally held space that welcomes people from around the globe;
- A nurturing and vulnerable space to dive deeper into ourselves by building new relationships and challenging assumptions and definitions… which does not mean that the experiences will always be “easy” or “harmonious”;
- An experimental space to play with, akin to an interactive arts exhibit, one that comes with the promise of tension and the risk of failure and one in which you have sovereignty around the extent to which you want to engage;
- A creative expression of the life force of the project planners, the participants, and all that we are connected to and come from.