Where the Institute comes from.

Around 100 people came to Berlin over the weekend of 9–11 November 2018, on the anniversary of the fall of the Wall — a date that carries in Germany a particular weight of historical rupture and possibility. The venues were spread across Kreuzberg and Neukölln: the FvF Friends Space on Glogauer Strasse, the cocreation.loft on Schinkestr., and Klunkerkranich, an improbable rooftop bar above the Neukölln Arcaden.

In his welcome, Tomas Björkman offered the framing image that would carry through all subsequent gatherings: participants are like the blind people trying to describe the elephant — each understanding something true but partial. The gathering existed to deepen each person's work and to begin connecting the parts, not to produce a unified vision but to start discerning the contours of what was emerging.

Friday gave way to workshops — eighteen sessions across three time slots. Daniel Görtz on metamodern theory. Jonathan Rowson on spiritual sensibility and a metamodern reader for the new Perspectiva Press. Lene Rachel Andersen on 21st-century Bildung. Erik Fernholm on tech for personal growth at scale. Caroline Stiernstedt Sahlborn on deliberately developmental spaces — Ekskäret Island, K9 co-living, the cocreation.loft — as prototypes the network might learn from. Alexander Björkman ran what would turn out to be a significant session: a metamodern college or monastery in Kyiv, a seed that bore fruit the following year.

Berlin 2018 was small, exploratory and deliberately unfinished. That was the point. It was the beginning of something none of the people in the room could yet see whole.

The second Emerge Gathering took place across the weekend of 27–29 September 2019, 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. The choice of city was deliberate. "Kyiv is in many ways a frontier land," Tomas Björkman said in his opening. "Systems change always starts at the periphery, not in the centre, of a system."

The three founding organisations gathered their growing European network around the question that had animated the project from the beginning: what is emerging? Björkman's introduction offered the clearest statement yet of the intellectual framework — EMERGE as an acronym spanning Enquiry, Method, Epoch, Reckoning, Games and Ethos.

Sixteen Friday sessions ran 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. Saturday turned inward: Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger led the main hall through an emergent dialogue process they had been developing for two decades — a room of a hundred people arriving at something that felt like shared grief and shared stillness.

The evening brought the Metamodern Arts Festival, curated by Halea Isabelle Kala, including the Glass Bead Game inspired by Hermann Hesse. Kyiv 2019 stands, in retrospect, as the moment the network was most simply and openly itself: curious, experimental, and genuinely uncertain about where it was going.

Around 250 people came to Berlin across the weekend of 9–10 October 2021, with an informal welcome the evening before. The pandemic had intervened. The world had shifted. And the question that had always animated Emerge — how do we form a 'we' capable of responding to what we are facing? — had become both more urgent and harder to answer.

The gathering was arranged by Perspectiva and supported by the Berlin Senate's department for economics and enterprise. It was produced by Anna Katharina Schaffner, and organised jointly with Ivo Juriaan Mensch, Tomas Björkman and Jonathan Rowson. The facilitation core — Indra Adnan, Elizabeth Debold, Pamela von Sabljar, Thomas Steininger and Phoebe Tickell — shaped two days at the bUm space in Kreuzberg.

The intellectual framing had sharpened. The welcome text named the paradox directly: a bigger we is regularly called upon to address our burning global challenges, yet even the climate crisis has not brought us closer together. The social change space is no less fragmented than anywhere else — people married to their own theories of change, their brands, their niches. Is the dream of a coherent collective agency simply a dream? The gathering did not resolve that question. It held it.

The gathering generated a cluster of essays — Jonathan Rowson's 'The Impossible We?', Anna Katharina Schaffner's 'Can Emergence Be Our Saving Grace?' and Phoebe Tickell's 'Moral Imaginations'. Berlin 2021 marked the moment the field began to take stock of what it had built — and what it still needed to become.

The first North American Emerge gathering took place over a weekend in late June 2022. Around 160 people attended by invitation — practitioners, thinkers, founders and artists drawn from across the United States and connected internationally to Emerge's European network. It was smaller than the Berlin events, deliberately so: depth over breadth, bringing the relational quality of the European gatherings into a new geography.

The gathering took place at a particular moment. The pandemic had just released its grip on public life, but the damage it had done — to institutions, to trust, to a shared sense of reality — was still raw. Climate disruption was no longer a future scenario but a present condition. The information ecosystem felt fractured in ways that made coordinated response to any of this increasingly difficult.

What united the participants was less a shared ideology than a shared perception: that the challenges of the moment could not be addressed through the logic that had produced them. Something in the structure of institutions, of knowing, of how humans organise themselves — needed to shift at a level deeper than policy or innovation. The method was deliberately open. No single framework was promoted.

What Austin represented, in retrospect, was a threshold moment for Emerge as a project. The gathering named honestly what the network risked becoming — a community known only to itself — and asked what it would take to become genuinely useful beyond its own boundaries. The Emerge Institute now exists, in part, because those seeds needed somewhere to grow.