Kyiv, September 2019

The second Emerge Gathering took place in Kyiv over the weekend of 27–29 September 2019, bringing together around 180 participants from across Europe at the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives – a former industrial space on the banks of the Dnipro that had become one of Ukraine's most vital centres for contemporary art and civic culture.

Kyiv is in many ways a frontier land. Systems change always starts at the periphery, not in the centre, of a system.Tomas Björkman · opening remarks

That instinct proved prescient in ways nobody could have anticipated. Kyiv in 2019 was a city still living the aftershocks of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity – politically awake, culturally inventive, and genuinely unfinished in ways that Western European capitals had long since ceased to be. It was exactly the kind of place the gathering needed.

The three founding organisations – Ekskäret Foundation, Co-Creation Loft and Perspectiva – gathered their growing network around the question that had animated the project from the beginning: what is emerging? Björkman's introduction framed EMERGE as an acronym spanning Enquiry, Method, Epoch, Reckoning, Games and Ethos – a map of the territory the network was trying to traverse together.

Friday brought sixteen sessions in two parallel sets, from Integral and Metamodern Philosophy to Deliberately Developmental Spaces, from a politics capable of the moment to the Bildung tradition in Ukraine and the Balkans. Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger led a workshop on masculine/feminine integration; Elke Fein and Daniel Görtz led the integral and metamodern philosophy session; Daniel Thorson and Joana Breidenbach asked whether something like an Emerge Academy might take root in Kyiv itself.

Saturday turned inward. Debold and Steininger led the main hall through an emergent dialogue process they had developed over two decades – which participants described as unexpectedly spiritual, a room of a hundred people in an industrial warehouse arriving at something like shared grief and shared stillness. Joe Ross opened both mornings with poetry; Pamela von Sabljar held the facilitation throughout. The evening brought the Metamodern Arts Festival, curated by Halea Isabelle Kala, including a Glass Bead Game inspired by Hermann Hesse.

It was one of the last large European cultural events of its kind before the pandemic changed everything. When Emerge met again, in Berlin in 2021, the world it was meeting in had been fundamentally altered.