Most of the ways we articulate the challenges facing ‘the world’ today and how we are organizing in the shadows of these challenges may seem very counterintuitive to many. As such, we take pains to share what makes ten a compelling field of experiments in a time of turbulence. 

ten is an attempt to organize at the edges of the unknown.

Implied in this modality is our frank admission that we do not know what we are organizing for! As such, we’ve elected not to use terms like “membership” to describe how we think you might participate in our projects. While naming things is a necessary ritual for living well with others and the planet, “membership” is too coherent – it presumes a unified whole, an identity to adopt, a pre-relational space to be identified with, a naming of the thing or the body before we’ve touched it, roamed in it, and have been marked by it. With ten and the sociomaterial experiments and ecologies of practices that it gently and lightly holds and seeks to nourish, there is no “in-group” identity. We are also quite sensitive to the proliferation of “communities”, and are reticent about deploying the term uncritically.

Instead, our art is decay and fugitivity – not membership. 

Our story is that white stability (as a globalizing enactment of racialized, planetary belonging) is hollowing out, and our work is to weave new materialities of care that “catch them where they fall”.

Our desire is to speak to a more-than-human enlistment that is afoot, a strange wind blowing that is carrying us away from our material obligations to the familiar. Our wandering about is for sensuous solidarities that trace attempts at touching the tensions of our becoming, and potentially alters subjectivity.  

We prefer to speak of ‘an infection’: how bodies are becoming distressed, marked, touched, spirited away, queered, reframed, and enlisted in new art cartographies that are not always available for description.

This is ten’s experiential, highly participatory, translocal and place-based network of practice and experimentation platform. It includes online interaction and local / translocal community building, local / translocal gatherings, discussions, and engagements with other participants.

This space is creative, intimate, generative, and centered on curiosity and practice.

Our invitations to you are therefore carefully framed as calls to the art of making sanctuary, to the work of cultivating practices that allow us to become intelligent within the syncopations, tensions and cracks of decay. Your incapacity to measure up, your failures, your slipping away from the image of the proper subject is your enlistment in this planetary art.

This is a process, not a destination, not a solution.

This is a rhizomatic assemblage of co-becoming, a fungal carpet of knots and departures, an underground politics that is not about contesting space within the shriveling pixels of a stressed frame, but about playfully attending to and following the outbreaks of desire where they might lead.

This is a post-democratic project, a postactivist praxis, a betweening of lines, a vocation of tracing out the rich ecosystems of the useless, a way of becoming more response-able to the impasses of modernity.

The ten Core Team is currently experimenting with a petri-dish-sized infection involving the Regional Conveners from the 2023 course-festival, We Will Dance with Mountains. This electrifying and curious collection of regional “knots” strung across the planet are already meeting (mostly in person) to practice and explore postactivism, ontofugitivity and other ways of knowing.

We will be in a small-scale experimental phase with this translocal group throughout 2024 and aspire to have a more public offering/way of getting entangled in 2025.