What does it mean to gather, especially now, amidst planetary precarity? In this moment of converging crises, how can we gather in ways that do not reproduce the extractive and transactional patterns that brought us here? What would it mean to gather, not to solve or resolve, but to sit with the tensions of crises?

Together,
to gather,
to get there.^[1]

We have gathered like this before, in neat rows, in classrooms, in meetings. We have gathered to organise, to categorise, to optimise. To name the crisis, measure the damage, predict the end. But what if the gathering itself is cracked? What if the ways we come together also need to fall apart? What if gathering could be an opening, a becoming, a loosening, not just an act but a practice?

In this time of accelerating collapse, where the climate crisis is not a distant horizon but an intimate atmosphere, inhaled daily, it feels urgent to revisit what it means to gather. Not merely as an act of assembly, but as an attunement, an ethical choreography of bodies, stories, and breaths.

Together, to gather, to get there.

This is how Alessandra Pomarico, with Kū Kahakalau and Kate Morales, invites us into their reading.^[2] Not toward an arrival, but toward a practice of becoming-with, again and again—an ongoing attunement to the currents of relation, disruption, and renewal that shape our gatherings.

Blanche Verlie and Astrida Neimanis remind us that breathing itself is an attunement, a practice of becoming-with. As they write, breathing ‘demonstrates that no one body can know the entirety of climate collapse through their own breath’. The scale and violence of this crisis cannot be metabolised by any single person, or community, or breath.^[3] Yet, when we gather, we begin to notice that the crisis moves through us—surfacing an unease in the body, a tightness in the chest, a trembling in the voice, or a silence heavy with knowing.

At a recent gathering organised by A Climate for Art, each day, amidst presentations heavy with the weight of our time, we were invited to choose: walk it out, talk it out, write it out. This was not framed as a solution or a coping strategy, but as a rupture from the default mode of passive absorption. An interruption of the tendency to listen without consequence. An invitation to metabolise, rather than simply consume, the provocations and presentations offered each day.

Some of us took to the paths, others found corners to write, or circles to speak. This rhythm of pause and movement felt like a counter-practice to the extractive logic of information consumption. It was an invitation to refuse the speed of solutions and instead dwell in the discomfort, the unknowing, the collective breathlessness.

It was a reminder that bodies process differently, that witnessing is not neutral, that knowledge does not land evenly or without cost.

Amidst discussions of crisis and resilience, the act of gathering itself emerged as an act of refusal.

A refusal of isolation. A refusal of disconnection. Gathering is how we remind each other that no one survives alone.

Pomarico, Kahakalau and Morales speak of spaces that ‘serve us, expand our capacities, stretch our perceptions, refine our sensibilities, and amplify the senses’.^[4] Spaces that rupture our habits of separation and invite us to re-member—to piece back together what has been erased, divided, dismembered by colonial, capitalist, patriarchal paradigms.

But re-membering is not a romantic return; it is a slow, difficult, often painful process. It asks us to feel the weight of what has been lost and what has been made unbearable. It asks us to gather not only with those we agree with, but with the fractures, the tensions, the impossibilities. To recognise that the breath we share is also the breath that is unevenly distributed, choked, commodified, stolen.^[5]

What might it mean, then, to gather in ways that do not replicate the violences we mourn? To gather as an act of conspiratorial witnessing^[6]—knowing we cannot hold the whole, and yet refusing to look away?

Verlie and Neimanis name this practice of witnessing as feminist conspiratorial breathing.^[7] They write, ‘We are the witness, we are the witnessed, yet we are never fully any of this’.^[8]

In these spaces, I felt this. I felt how gathering is not about consensus, but about staying with the fracture, the dissonance, the impossibility. About noticing who is breathless, who is silenced, who is carrying the weight of collapse in their chest.

What if gathering is not about getting there, but about getting lost together? About refusing the linear path, the promised destination, and instead lingering in the terrain of uncertainty, grief, and partial connection?

To gather without an agenda, without a deliverable, without needing to be productive.

To gather because we are afraid.

To gather because we are grieving.

To gather because we are uncertain.

To gather otherwise is to risk being undone.

To gather otherwise is to let the breath catch in your throat, knowing it is not yours alone.

To gather otherwise is to refuse the ease of separation, to lean into the messy, entangled, uneven air we all breathe.

Together.

To gather.

To get there—though ‘there’ may not be a place, but a practice, a way of staying with the trouble,^[9] breathing anyway.

To gather is not simply to assemble bodies in a room. It is to court the risk of entanglement, to allow our edges to fray, to listen beyond what we can metabolise alone.

This piece is not a conclusion, but a breath offered into the tangled air we share.

It is written with gratitude for the spaces and people who dare to gather otherwise—to refuse speed, certainty, or mastery, and instead invite rupture, refusal, and re-membering.

As you read, I invite you to pause, to notice how these words land in your body. What sensations arise as you encounter the messiness, the tenderness, the unfinished-ness of this reflection? How do you gather? Who or what is gathered with you, whether you notice them or not? What breath is possible here, even amidst the collapse?

May this text be a small conspiratorial breath between us—a reminder that we can choose, again and again, to show up differently. To gather otherwise. To breathe otherwise. To refuse otherwise.

Together.

To gather.

To get there.

Dr Jacina Leong 梁玉明 is an artist-curator, educator and researcher engaged in critical processes of community engagement, arts leadership, cultural strategy, and curatorial practice. She lives and practises on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri people in Narrm/Melbourne, and is of mixed racial (Chinese and Italian) background.

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