100 Acres¹⁾ by Dr. Erin Manning, participant in the ten Visionary Council

‘Loom’ can be traced back to the Old English words lōma or gelome, meaning a tool, utensil, or implement of frequent use. It invokes the themes of braiding, tapestries, weaving, webs, materials, and networks – all of which have been central to the imagination, practices, and life of the organism called ten (The Emergence Network).

The etymological origins of ten gestures towards acts of stretching, holding, extending, spreading, diffusing, spinning, weaving and composing. Honoring our deep entanglement with the loom, this piece is a patchwork of stories, reflections, and meanderings from participants in the ten organism.

We pay attention to the loom as a guide and tool to string together words and worlds.

Participant in the ten Visionary Council, Fabrice Olivier Dubosc, leads us to the land of myth and fairytale, and the portals they open during troubling times.

He narrates:

The West African loom as Ancestor, in Fulbe tradition, gestures towards initiation. The speculative fabulations of storytelling threads trace a shapeshifting cartography aimed at widening our capacity to weave the personal and the impersonal, the human and the “more than” in a journey towards re-collection and re-membering our deep entanglement with the “Voidless Void.”

Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the Malian ambassador of oral tradition, talks of storytelling as a vector of initiation and the way he explains it is with the parable of the weaving loom. He recalls the simplicity of the Fulbe loom²⁾. Four wooden posts tied together to form a rectangle and threaded through with vertical strings forming the warp. The shuttle with the yarn or the wool will thread through the warp and the resulting weft will eventually become a textile being…

The right-hand agency holds the shuttle and passes it through the warp… at one point it has to let go and pass it to the left hand agency, and then the left hand will do the same thing: passing the thread through the warp and throwing it to the right. Hampâté Bâ points to kairos, the synchronistic moment of emergence when the hand has to let go. When the weaving shuttle passes through the void that is the moment when the weaving takes place.

And so it is in that rich, indeterminate, unforeseeable, relational space between storyteller and listener that a portal opens…

We are told by physics that the Absolute Void does not exist because the source of all becoming seems to lie in an ever-emerging relational quantum field of possibilities. Everything exists in relation to something else.

Buddhist tradition expresses this through the concept of pratityasamutpada, contextual (never absolute) relationality.

Fairytales in all their variability seem to gesture both towards the entangled and troubling metabolic dimension of life-death, allowing the reversal of fortune and misfortune while pointing to deep-time recollection within the rhythmic dimension of reality.

Indetermination is a necessary threshold for the storytelling space. This is well expressed by the Turkish incipit of every fairy tale: bir varmış, bir yokmuş: “It is said there was, it is said there wasn’t…”.

This brings to mind the wonderful creation myth narrated by Hampâté Bâ in his book on fairy tales as carrier bags of initiation³⁾. [my adaptation]

Before the creation of the world, before the beginning of all things, there was nothing, except a BEING. This Being was nameless Void, but it was a Living Void⁴⁾, potentially sourcing all possible multiverse existences… The abode of this One-Being was infinite and timeless…

Endowing itself with Eyes, Timelessness consented to Rhythm: it closed its eyes, it was Night, it opened its eyes, it was Day.

(In rhythm, opposites are needed and deeply entangled, rather than rigidly separated in excluding binaries.)

The tale goes on:

Eventually the Sun married the Moon and from the rhythm of their embrace, Doumounna (Time) was born… still “divine” but definitely Temporal Time.
So the Endless-Divine-Timeless-Nameless-Voidless-Void, after creating rhythm and now endowing themselves with a name – Guéno – desired to be KNOWN. Thus he created a marvelous egg that included the nine fundamental dimensions of being. Then he gave the Cosmic Egg to Doumunna, Temporal Divine Time.

He said: “Sit over it and brood it with patience, whatever comes out of it will come out of it.” When the Cosmic Egg hatched it gave birth to twenty powerful Cosmic Beings embodying visible and invisible qualities, forces and drives.

Yet none of these was the one Guéno had imagined as his own partner in creative relational unknowing…

So Guéno mixed them all and, breathing some of his own fiery Spirit into the mixture, gave birth to another creature: Neddo, the Primordial Human.

Guéno wanted Neddo to engage in the fiery task of harmonizing conflicting forces through the space of awareness. Thus, a long story of conflict, descent and dialectical failures ensued before humans could even have an inkling of what awareness might NOT be.

As a matter of fact, the first fully embodied couple gave birth to Habana-Koel which means “each man for himself;” in other words, gave birth to separation and individuation. And Habana-Koel gave birth to Tcheli which means “crossroads”… and from crossroads all further dualities and trickstering, conflicting binaries emerged, challenging us to learn to co-create and inhabit reality and its conflicts until eventually finding a way to reconnect with Guéno and the blessed space of “generative indetermination” – the uncanny, invisible and fugitive source of Being.
Thus our call to weave our deep time post-apocalyptic tale of love and grief in the ruins.

100 Acres by Dr. Erin Manning

From one thread of fabulation to another, ten Advisory Board participant, Sofia Batalha, spins a tale of the Valley as a ceremonial handloom. One of the exuberant entities that ten has grown up alongside over these past nine years is Báyò Akómoláfé’s audacious festival-course, We Will Dance with Mountains⁵⁾. The Mountains are a ruckus place of celebration and postactivist experimentation which invite thousands of people from all over the world to come together in online and in-person gatherings over a kronos-bound three-month period. In contrast to the grandeur and visibility of the mountains, the dark and fertile Valley (which is ten) offers space for tensions, contradictions, relationalities, and contrasting rhythms to emerge.

She writes:

Here in the Valley, we are nested between dancing Mountains. Here, the forces of gravity conspire, downcutting and ultimately ushering to deep, slender chasms ⁶⁾. The Valley and the Mountains hold an affective and generative paradox, for the dancing peaks are the excess of the Valley, while the evocative depths are the negative space of the Mountains. The throbbing gorge is the communal geomorphic foundation for slow sanctuary, an anchoring translocal place to witness the “cracks, fissures, fault lines, discontinuities, splits, rifts, ruptures, seismic shifts, world-ending openings, miracles, strange encounters, and the yawning maw of a monster.”⁷⁾

Through its elongated negative-space body, the Valley harbors and attends to the tensions, pressures, and constrictions, arising from holding multiple passages and possibilities. The Valley may even be like a ceremonial handloom, where numerous threads weave paradoxical nests, in diverse textures and patterns, coalescing in “materially embedded and embodied, differential, affective and relational”⁸⁾ practices, “negotiating collectively about what (…) we are in the process of becoming.”⁹⁾

Handloom weaving is an ancient and feral affair, neither age nor gender-specific, a community practice of irregular habits of production, incompatible with, even opposed to, efficiency, productivity, or surplus¹⁰⁾. The handloom is a non-binary spell of interconnected affection, interlacing slender and flexible fibers to make fabric, from native plants or animal hair ¹¹⁾. An animist, sensual and direct experience learned from nest-weaving birds, accepting the rhythmic multiplicity of perspectives and locations as embodied and embedded, in ambiguously rich bonds, sharing, dancing, singing, performing rituals, and telling stories.

Staying.

The slow erosion, coupled with the deep tectonic movement, shapes the Valley as a place to stretch, extend, spread, and diffuse the tendrils of postactivism¹²⁾ on steep, rugged ground¹³⁾.

In an intersection of local and virtual, the Valley community cultivates a thriving underground network of postactivist practitioners, interested in exploring other ways of knowing, being, sensing, relating, and responding to the crises of our time.

100 Acres by Dr. Erin Manning

The ten organism is the Valley itself.

A co-creative process of crafting principles for collaboration

Although the curators, custodians and practitioners who dance with ten have never had the literal opportunity to weave with one another (mostly because they’re spread out all over the planet), they have figuratively practiced weaving webs of support for themselves, their work and their ecosystems. In 2022, seven incredible people from around the world (most of whom had never collaborated with one another or with ten before) came together in an expansive and audacious experiment to listen, learn and lean into what was being called for within and around this strange organism called The Emergence Network. The group committed to shared leadership to create the conditions for the next iteration of ten to be more locally-rooted, practically & outrageously experimental, and to rehabilitate exiled capacities in our rapidly collapsing systems.

One of their first undertakings was to embark on a journey of co-creating principles of collaboration/aspirational qualities of being, working and playing together. They called these aspirational principles, the Intra-active Woven Web of Fundaments. This involved various processes including two full-group calls, working in pairs, asynchronous wordsmithing & questions on a shared vision board, phone calls, text messages & numerous emails.

Beyond these steps and phases, there were also experimental practices employed to create the conditions for this fungal carpet of fundaments to be nourishing for the people and the process. These practices included: listening to one another to try to feel into the meaning of words proposed by others; listening into the other-than-human world to move beyond limited anthropocentric understandings of what the humans in this small experiment might need one from one another; allowing for divergent processes and slowing down. Rather than following a predetermined plan to “accomplish” the task of having a set of principles, these collaborators took the time that was needed, allowing for meandering and gradual insights and phrases to come to fruition when they were ready. There was, of course, also a fair amount of convergence, clustering and connecting necessary to finally thread together this rich and profound meshwork¹⁴⁾. Some of these fundaments included:

In many ways, we think about the essence of The Emergence Network (ten) resembling a loom, or lōma (an Old English term of unknown origin meaning “a frame used for weaving”).

Báyò Akómoláfé, ten’s Visionary Founder shares:

The term lōma may not reveal anything to anyone about what it means immediately, but there's something fugitive about it… almost hidden, and yet noble…

The lōma's work is to nourish the weaving, to help frame it so that it can thrive. The title is not the organization, but a reference to the task – which is more than human, and larger than human responsibility or duties.

The task of the lōma is both ancient and present; it is handed down from our ancestors and is ours to pass down. Weaving holds us together, adds texture and layers while also permitting us to fray at the edges and come undone.

The lōma reminds us to trust the speed of the cloth. To tend to the in-between spaces where relationalities are born, where theory, ideas, conversations, processes, stories, and gestures converge. To welcome and celebrate awkwardness, failure, trouble, difference, and grief as kin. To experiment with a longing to fail.

To be lōma is to listen deeply for what is being called for. To lean back into our ancestors and into the other-than-human. To move between the cosmic and the granular, the individual and collective fields. To unfold, always in-process, becoming…

Contributions by Aerin Dunford, Pooja Kishinani, Erin Manning, Marianthe Loucataris, Fabrice Olivier Dubosc, Sofia Batalha and Báyò Akómoláfé from The Emergence Network.

Aerin Dunford is the Lead WeaverA local, regional, or national network or organization that connects or consists of multiple Alternatives on different themes/spheres, in an inter-sectorial way. A global network cannot be a Waever, neither a thematic one. It should be a collective process of some kind, rather than only a single individual or single organization. By being a "weaver", they are committed to participate in the GTA, developing ways of dialogue, interconnection, collaboration and solidarity with other Weavers. GTA promotes the interconnection of the Weavers, identifying [[:weavers:criteria|a series common criteria for the weaving of Alternatives]]. Examples: Vikalp Sangam and Crianza Mutua. at ten. She is a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. She is an independent consultant at  Coquixa Consultores  using El Arte del Liderazgo Participativo and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations and groups of all kinds.

Báyò Akómoláfé is the founder of ten, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is a posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, author, and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, We Will Dance with Mountains.

Erin Manning is a part of the ten Visionary Council. Her practice moves between philosophy, movement and art. 3e is the main direction her current research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. 

Fabrice Olivier Dubosc is a part of the ten Visionary Council. He is a clinical psychologist and researcher in decolonial postactivism. He is also active in local and transnational eco-psycho-social fugitive under commons and in education. He has published a number of books and articles, mostly in Italian.

Marianthe Loucataris was a part of ten’s Dung Beetles project in 2022. She is a digital media artist, musician, composer, sound designer, creative producer, project manager, community cultural development officer and arts administrator.

Pooja Kishinani is ten’s Programme and Operations Coordinator. She is a writer, researcher, and long-distance runner based in India. She is the co-author of ‘Student Guide to the Climate Crisis’.

Sofia Batalha is a part of the ten Advisory Board. She is a graphic designer by training, a teacher by chance, a writer by visceral need, and an independent (re)searcher by natural curiosity. She is the Author of nine books and editor of the free online magazine, Wind and Water.

A brief note on the process of stitching this piece:

The words and textiles in this piece were created by participants of the ten organism at different points in time. Fabrice and Sofia’s stories were written during a digital gathering to celebrate a new season of ten; the Intra-active Woven Web of Fundaments was the result of a co-creative experiment in crafting principles of collaboration; Báyò’s reflections on the role of the lōma emerged from conversations with kin around the structure of ten; and Erin’s textile is still being woven…

All of them explore the metaphor of weaving through unique angles. Pulling together these different threads has been a delightful journey leading to the creation of a colourful and strange tapestry. It has reminded us that weaving - of words, ideas, fabrics, compositions, relationalities and so on - has been and continues to be the pulse of ten.