ten is an attempt at the end of the world.
At a time when contemporary politics feels stuck, when white modernity seems unable to sustain its production of dissociated individual citizen-subjects, ten is a collective experiment within the cracks of the usual. A village of emerging gestures and practices inspired by posthumanist, Yoruba indigenous, and postactivist instigations. A gathering without a name, without a face – not within the designated spaces of the public to speak truth to power, but at the edges of the familiar, in the dungeons of abjection, to rehearse new possibilities.
ten is a planetary network of care and inquiry gesturing towards new assemblages of response-ability during moments when the ways that we think about and address the troubling crises of our times are increasingly a part of those crises.
ten is a light holding of bodies in the mechanical grip of whiteness gently swaying to the syncopated arrhythmic arrivals of loss – a radical hospitality that catches them where they fall.
ten is an invitation to embarkation, the partial tracing out and nomadic quest for a binary-dissolving third way, for a minor gesture that exceeds method, for a pragmatics of the useless, for a sensorial apostasy, for a mutiny that upsets the patterns that lock us in.
ten is an anagrammatic disruption of politics as usual, a gesturing towards the unheard-of, the unsaid, the middling places glossed over by the neurotypical lines we draw from ourselves to utopia.
ten is an a-communal longing for failure, for hybrids, for stranger solidarities, for openings.
ten is a coming down to earth.
We are a fugitive, underground network of social artists seeking to create new openings to age-old problems. We aim to disrupt dominant modes of perception, engagement, and responsiveness in a time of crisis by disturbing modern notions of justice, power, and human agency.
This is the work of postactivism, a concept developed by ten’s visionary founder, Báyò Akómoláfé. We do this work by instigating collaborative, creative processes in translocal interventions as a cultural practice.
Our shared vision is of a political emancipatory project of interdependent networks and ecologies of practice interested in shifting our ontological gaze beyond the staid confines and moral purview of justice, diversity, representation and inclusion. By engaging in deep inquiry, conversations, and experimental processes, we aim to nurture an underground movement at the end of hope.
“Making sanctuary is my theory of emancipation that takes bodies, flows, fields, assemblages, networks, intensities, forces, maps, apparatuses, principalities / powers, territories, and terrains into consideration. It takes off from a realization that we cannot think through the primacy and stability of the ‘human’ anymore.
That we are not in charge. Not ahead of the curve.”
Báyò Akómoláfé