What's Dying to Live?

What’s Dying to Live?

31 October – 2 November 2024

What’s Dying to Live? was conceived and held by Sara Rothwell as a three-day pancultural gathering within The Emergence Network’s five-day translocal Becoming Monster festival.

Exploring death, decay, grief, fertility, transformation and life, the gathering brought together artists, musicians, practitioners and participants through art, ritual, somatic movement, sound, music, collective making, workshops and contemplation.

At its heart sat a series of questions: What is dying to live? What might be born from our physical and metaphysical compost? How can we hold grief and joy in both hands? And what happens when we descend more deeply into our bodies, our grief and our relationship with death, in order to become more human/e?

Chthonia

The gathering began on Samhain with Chthonia, a descent into the underworld.

Participants were invited to arrive dressed as their shadow or monster selves before moving together in procession through Old Mother Dark. Sara led a Samhain meditation and movement practice, creating a space for descent, encounter and transition, accompanied by Dembis Thioung, whose ancestral West African rhythms brought sound, movement and the body into the ritual.

The Wound That Binds Us

On 1 November, Ffion Campbell Davies facilitated The Wound That Binds Us, an exploration of grief, wounding and collective experience through the wounded voice, sound journeying and collective monster painting.

Rather than treating the wound as something private to be hidden or repaired, the work opened a space to encounter what might connect us through our individual and collective wounds.

Día de los Muertos

The final day moved towards remembrance, ancestry and celebration with a Día de los Muertos gathering hosted by Elki Guillen.

Music came from Esteban Card, Valeria Pacific and Dembis Thioung, bringing live music, rhythm and collective celebration into the space.

Artist Elizabeth Salazar led a mask-making workshop and artist talk, while a public ancestor altar created a place for participants to bring photographs, offerings and memories of their dead.

Death was held here not only through grief, but through colour, music, making, memory and celebration.

Joining

Running throughout the gathering was Anna Vicente’s participatory work Joining.

Drawing upon horticultural grafting and practices of repair, participants joined fragments of dead wood together to create new assemblages. These individual acts of joining gradually became part of a larger collective effigy.

The effigy gathered the traces of the three days, the making, grief, death, decay and possibility of new life, before being dismantled and taken into Wolves Lane Centre, where it was left to gestate through the winter.

At Imbolc, the pieces were brought back together and rebuilt, allowing the work itself to move through a cycle of dismantling, wintering and re-emergence.

What’s Dying to Live? was never intended to offer an answer to death or grief. It was a space in which death and life could be encountered together, where decomposition could become generative, where grief could sit beside joy, and where what was ending might be allowed to become compost for whatever wanted to emerge next.

Becoming Monster

30 October – 3 November 2024
Five-day festival presented by The Emergence Network. Virtual, hybrid and in-person programme.

Becoming Monster was a five-day festival created by The Emergence Network, opening a space during the period when the veils are traditionally understood to be thin, spanning Halloween, Samhain, Día de los Muertos, Todos Santos and All Souls Day.

The festival explored the interconnected cycles of death and regeneration, alongside ideas of othering, monstrosity and the hospicing of modernity.

At its heart was an exploration of our physical and metaphysical compost, of dissolution, wintering and re-emergence, and of how we might learn to hold grief and joy in both hands, becoming a little more human/e in the process.