The Abysstery Core Team Retreat

The Abysstery is a postactivist-artistic residency and process-based, inter-arts convening that centers relationality, play, and emergence as core artistic methodologies. Bringing together a cohort of artists and cultural practitioners connected to Toronto and broader Canada, the residency explores art not as product, but as a living practice of co-creation, inquiry, and embodied research.

Rather than working toward predetermined outcomes, participants engage in a collaboratively curated process that privileges experimentation, uncertainty, and interdependence. Play is approached as a rigorous and necessary mode of investigation—one that allows for risk, vulnerability, and the rehearsal of new ways of being together amidst ongoing social, ecological, and political instability.

The residency integrates virtual gatherings with in-person intensives in Ontario, fostering a decentralized, evolving network of practitioners. Through shared exploration across artistic forms, participants cultivate practices of presence, responsiveness, and collective care.

This project contributes to a growing field of post-activist cultural work by creating space for reflection, resilience, and new relational imaginaries—foregrounding process over product and connection over certainty.

At the end of May 2026, the Core Team for The Abysstery will be gathering for 3 days in downtown Toronto to weave relationship, name our principles for collaboration, practice together and come to agreements about logistics for the program.