Open Collective Europe

There is a river beneath our feet. An undulating current in our bones. A story older than the fences of empire and more mischievous than the maps that pretend to name the world. This current below is the why… is the how… of our invitation to you now. We are not asking you to give. We are inviting you to flow. In a time when politics curdles and institutions gasp for breath, we remember that water – the ancient fugitive, the slithering trickster – is still shaping valleys, still carving out the possible. ten is such a valley. A murmuration of minor gestures. A sanctuary where grief meets creativity, and where failure is not a mistake but an acceptance of our shared incompleteness. This April, we invite you to join us in our humble effort to raise funds for ten’s work via the grassroots fundraiser, Becoming-Water: Flows of Generosity. We are crafting an underground scaffolding in preparation for the in-person seasonal festival, Liquid Cartographies: Reshaping the Banks of the Possible. We are growing our core operations team by hiring a partnership and relationship tender. We continue to nurture a mycelial commons of translocal co-practice with An Infection , a fellowship of cracks. We wish to raise $15,000USD over the course of the next six weeks. Your contribution – however small – is not a coin in a slot. It is a drop in a river that already knows where it is going. If you’ve sensed the pull of this work… If the world feels too brittle for the weight it must carry… If you are seeking a different kind of activism, one that murmurs and misbehaves… Then come. Flow with us. Seep into the cracks of a world still being born.

Update: We Spilled Beyond Our Goal! Here at ten, we are deeply grateful to friends and strangers alike for sporulating with us by participating in our fundraising campaign. We are thrilled to share that we have raised $9,000 USD via the abundance and generosity of our unbelievable community!  A tremendous thank you for journeying with us into the generative contagion of sporulation to imagine the new: the new that we do not yet know... landscapes we don't know how to articulate yet, fugitive futures that are not yet legible. Thank you for believing in our impossible dreams and breathing life into them! Sporulation : /spȯr-yə-ˈlā-shən/ the process by which an organism creates spores in response to harsh conditions. Spores are cells that can be found in bacteria, fungi, and plants. They have thick cell walls that help them survive in unfavorable conditions, and they preserve the organism's genetic material. Once conditions improve, spores can resume multiplying. Over the last couple of months, ten has slowly emerged from the underground. We opened the doors of our new mbari ** (aka website), inviting you to animate it with song, prayer, dance, and ritual. Within the skin of this new body, we are sensing the call to practice as a commonwealth of bewilderment, to host impossible dreams, and attempt to dance into them. We wish to build up the sporulative cells in our walls to continue tying fungal knots and weaving fugitive carpets as networks of practice and co-inquiry that support experiments in making sanctuary together. To breathe life into these impossible dreams, we are raising $8,000 USD by June 28th via the generosity and gifts of our unbelievable community. The funds we raise will help us co-create projects and gatherings, grow our core operations team, cover necessary operational costs, and support regional convenors in our growing trans-local fungal carpet An Infection . We have also started dreaming up a monstrous hybrid trans-local season festival for this October / November where we can explore experimental ways of gathering online to celebrate, grieve and become undone together. In the face of the so-called anthropocene, let us do outrageous, celebratory and experimental things together. Let us co-generate abundance as a way of responding to the present meta-crisis of our times, preparing ourselves to mutate into unexpected new forms and cultivate capacities that allow us to respond to the sensuous solidarities we are beginning to become aware of. Let us also grieve and decompose and put to rest our tired notions about what it is to be “human”. Sporulate with us by making a gift of any size to our fundraising campaign.