Convergence of Commoners Retreat

This session explored the ways commons and commoning shape our relationships with each other and the environments we inhabit. To engage in commoning is to affect and be affected, entangled in shifting landscapes of crisis and uncertainty.

We find ourselves in a world that feels increasingly strange—unsettling, disjointed, accelerating toward the unknown. In response to this strangeness, a call was made: an open invitation for essays, art, interventions, poems, and reflections that grapple with this eerie reality. Submissions arrived through networks and emails, forming a digital archive that captured fragmented encounters with disrupted spaces, haunted pasts, and futures that never came to be.

To deepen this engagement, the contributions were reimagined in a zine, a material artifact stitched together by hand, carrying the titles of each piece as a form of tactile inscription. This process embraced the strange, using it as a portal to new ways of seeing and imagining.

The zine is available on the Future Natures website, joining a growing ecosystem of independent publishing. A related project, GEOZONE, is also creating an archive of place-based zines, mapping out new territories of thought and resistance.