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? Or 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 the festival is not to identify or name monsters, nor to redraw hard lines around the right and the good. Becoming Monster isn’t a prescription to cure the world’s ills. It is 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 will introduce 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. The online, hybrid and in-person sessions have been offered up by friends and kin of ten (The Emergence Network), but the experience will be shaped by all of us who participate in a multiplicity of ways. You are welcome here. All of your various parts, emotions, practices, life experiences, questions, doubts and longings are welcome in this experimental festival.
Festival Details
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). It 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. Some of these in situ events will welcome in virtual participation as well. Please check back to learn more about the sessions, celebrations and artistic offerings and the contributors that will bring Becoming Monster to life. 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
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
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 unite the ternal return of the sacred now, 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.
Festival Pricing
The Becoming Monster Festival is offered in the spirit of the gift culture. We invite you to make a gift to support the artists and contributors who are leading us into this festival. Please contribute what you can and then a little bit more. Any additional funds raised will go to support the work of ten (The Emergence Network) in 2025. We ask that all participants make some financial contribution for the festival, no matter the size. However, if you feel deeply challenged by the financial requirements of participation, please write to us. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds or access to a credit/debit card.
We offer a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. The huge range between the scale is meant to reflect not only the incredible disparity in economic conditions between different parts of the world but also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms generally from the so-called Global South to the North. Ultimately, the payment system is designed for those with more access to wealth to cover the costs of those with less access to wealth; we trust your discernment of how you personally fit into this global economic context.
Medium Access to Wealth: $150 – $300 USD
High Access to Wealth: $300 – $500 USD
Low Access to Wealth: $5 – $50 USD
Pay-it-Forward: $500 USD + (financially support someone else’s participation)
As you decide what amount to pay, we ask that you not only consider your present-day financial situation governed by income but also factors including: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (do you have retirement savings?); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your country and in the world? do you expect to receive an inheritance?); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; and the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world).
F.A.Q.
What is this?
We are creating a five-day festival with virtual and in-person components from October 30th – November 3rd 2024. Becoming Monster is 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 will be art, ritual, sound, sensorial experiences, communing, grieving, celebrating, questioning, feeling, practices that feed our mind, body, spirit, and soul.
Why explore “becoming a monster”?
The creation of Becoming Monster Festival is 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 are you centering 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 is 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 is a space to explore the messiness of being alive and accepting death and grief as part of life. It is 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 welcomes and includes everyone, including our other-than-human and more-than-human kin. It is 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 be particularly attractive to those working with death, grief, loss and mourning in ways that transcend modern taboos on these subjects. Becoming Monster longs to serve the collective and questions the constricting limitations of hyper-individualism, so if you wish to participate as a community or group, this might be particularly enriching.
We imagine that the following kinds of people might be interested in Becoming Monster:
- People who are seeking spaces to grieve, connect and feel.
- People who are 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 who seek to or are engaged 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 will begin with an Opening Ritual on Wednesday, October 30th. We aim to have live online sessions scheduled from October 30th – November 2nd and distributed throughout different time slots in a 24-hour day, accommodating an international audience. We are particularly interested in folks who could host sessions during times that would be more accessible for people in South and Southeast Asia and Oceania. So if you know of anyone who might be interested in this, please have them contact us.
The online sessions will be facilitated by different people who have felt called to make an offering on the collective altar of Becoming Monster. Sessions will not happen at the same time each day. We expect people to come and go based on their schedules and their time zones. It’s not expected, nor will it be possible for participants to show up for all the offerings live. All live sessions will be recorded unless the contributor requests otherwise.
In addition to the live sessions facilitated by contributors, we also plan to offer daily live sessions every 12 hours with creative and somatic practices to support the metabolization and transmografication of your experiences throughout the festival.
We aspire to host a couple of Open Space sessions where participants, including you, can make offerings of their own to the wider group.
Becoming Monster will also encompass several place-based, in-person gatherings, rituals and experiments over the course of these five days in different geographical locations around the world. Some of these will be open to the public and others will be private affairs, though we will try to include all of the offerings on the list of sessions on the Becoming Monster webpage.
Place-based hosts of in-person sessions may also choose to include an online component to their events. These hybrid events may simply invite in witnesses and observers via a camera and microphone on site, or they may be able to engage virtual participation in a more active and co-creative manner as well.
Participants are also invited to connect and dialogue on the festival community platform on their own time before, during and after the festival. We will have 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 will close 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?
We deeply value participants’ emotional safety and well-being and, at the same time, we cannot promise safety. Because we are sending an open invitation for anyone in the world to join us, our space will contain many differences in worldviews and backgrounds. We hope these differences can create the conditions for new insights, new dreamings, and new possibilities while knowing that they may also lead to conflict and fragmentation. If it’s important to you to be in spaces where you can trust that people will always share your cosmovision or worldview, this will probably not be the right place for you.
We are counting on participants to use their discernment around when to prioritize their own safety and when to take risks and leap. Please review the Becoming Monster Community Guidelines for more information on our invitations around how to engage in this experience.
We will have a Care Team to support any participant or contributor in the festival experiencing challenging emotions or tensions with other participants, contributors or the material. This Care Team will also be responsible to remove any hateful language from our community platform and to de-escalate conflicts in that space, if necessary.
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 ask that if you do plan to engage in or host ritual or ceremony during Becoming Monster that you do your best to ensure that you do have the knowledge, wisdom and resources to hold those spaces with exquisite care. We also ask that you do whatever is needed to close the rituals with intentionality and attention, so as to maintain the integrity of the collective spaces we are co-creating. Please do whatever possible to prevent harm to those participating in these types of sessions.
We will have a Care Team available for ongoing support throughout the festival. Please note that we recommend and encourage 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) are beyond their capacity.
Where will this gathering be hosted?
The content for the online gathering will be hosted on the Becoming Monster community platform for the festival. Links to live Zoom sessions, Zoom recordings, and any other content that is part of this gathering will be stored there. The Becoming Monster community platform will also allow participants to dialogue with each other through online forums.
In order to participate in the gathering, we ask that you create an account on community platform when the invitation is sent out about one week before the start of the festival.
For events hosted locally, these will be announced at least three weeks prior to the festival on the Becoming Monster webpage so that people can make arrangements to attend in advance.
Where is the physical gathering taking place?
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 would love for participants to come with a willingness to try something that may be different, an interest in putting down or loosening up notions of what you think is 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 include 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 will 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, you will need a relatively strong internet connection to join the Zoom video conferencing sessions and participate in the online community forum. It is always enriching when folks can join with their cameras on, though we understand that there are many factors that can impact the feasibility of this option.
If you are participating in in-person events, the hosts of these sessions will be in touch in advance with anything that you need to bring or do in preparation for the gatherings.
Will this gathering be offered in languages besides English?
We are trying to learn about creating multilingual spaces and we hope to provide a few sessions that will not be in English. We will be able to create language-specific groups on the Becoming Monster community platform for discussion and sharing. We will provide information about how to create language-specific groups on the community platform when we send out invitations to join that space about a week before the gathering.
We unfortunately do not have the capacity nor resources to provide language interpretation and translation throughout the entire program.
Information about multi-lingual offerings will be posted on the webpage.
If you’d like to volunteer to translate content into other languages or write captions for those who are hard of hearing, please let us know by filling out this volunteer form here.
What if I can only participate in part of the gathering?
That’s totally fine. Participate in what you can and watch the recordings later!
Can I offer something as part of the program?
Yes! We will host a couple of Open Space sessions during our gathering in which anyone can offer something to the wider community whether it be a practice, a facilitated session, or just an open conversation on a topic.
How much does it cost to register?
This festival is being offered in the spirit of the gift culture. We do have a range of suggested contribution amounts (between $5USD and $500USD) but no one will be turned away due to lack of funds or access to a debit/credit card. If your current financial situation and season in life do not allow you to participate through our sliding scale options, please write to us.
Funds raised will first go towards meeting any financial requests of our contributors and artists. Any additional funds will go towards supporting The Emergence Network’s work in 2025.
What if I have trouble registering or paying?
The Becoming Monster team is here to support you. Registration is a two-step process:
1) Please fill out this registration form and
2) make a payment on ten’s Open Collective page
Given that the process requires these two steps, we recognize that it might not work as smoothly as we all would like. Please reach out to us if you need any assistance or with a request to participate without providing any financial payment. Our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
What is your refund policy?
We encourage you 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 is for you. Should you purchase a ticket and not be able to join, you can request a full refund (minus administration fees) through October 28th. After this date, unfortunately, we cannot refund any payments. Please get in touch with us at with your request. We reserve the responsibility of turning down requests for refunds.
What this isn’t:
- 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 is:
- 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.