The Invisible Architecture: Why We Gather

Sharon Avraham's founding letter for the ToGather Project, on growing up in a fading socialist village, finding Burning Man, and turning fifteen years of community fieldwork into a living archive.

What this essay argues

This is the founding letter of the ToGather Project. Sharon wrote it to introduce himself, the fifteen years of fieldwork behind the archive, and the question the whole project turns on: what is the invisible architecture that forms when people try to build a life together?

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. The friction framework here comes from Ilan Meyer, a consultant who has worked with more than forty kibbutzim over thirty years. It is the lens Sharon carries into every interview that follows.

The essay

I grew up in a society that was taking its last few breaths of socialism. A lot of the structures and rituals were still there, but the global forces of capitalism were already breaking them apart, alongside a violent colonialist political mindset that was corrupting the hearts of the people.

I was raised in what was called a “workers association village,” a collective of farmers who joined together to buy lands and manage the overhead of municipal life so they could focus on the land. My grandfather planted grapefruits and raised chickens. My dad turned those agricultural lands into a horse ranch. When it was my “turn,” I tried making it into an intentional space that focused on bringing people closer to the land and each other: a mini eco-village.

This attempt at building a life together was rooted in the way I was brought up. I was trained to collaborate in socialist youth movements, and I saw rituals around me that had their purpose hollowed out by the time I grew up, even if the facade was still in place. Nevertheless, I was still deeply inspired by my grandmother. She was the village nurse, and I grew up on stories about the deep camaraderie of village life. She had a close connection with the elders, and most of them had a story of how she saved their life or made it better simply by opening her house to everyone with a warm meal and a big heart.

But as I tried to build on my father's farm, I realized that a big heart and good intentions were not enough to keep a community from cracking.

When I was 21, life brought me to the Burning Man festival. This was a life-changing experience that presented the overwhelming creative force of what is possible when 70,000 people come together to create a temporary autonomous zone that focuses on amplifying human creativity. I was struck, and I ended up spending the better part of my 20s building local burns and art collectives, making my life as close as possible to the 10 Principles of Burning Man in real life.

Living in Israel and asking questions about radical inclusion eventually led me to open Pandora's box: the occupation of Palestinian people and the segregation that is so deeply rooted in this land of Palestine-Israel. I dived deep into activism circles, trying to use the same culture that brought thousands of Israelis to dance naked in the desert to fuel a political imagination. I wanted to create a shared culture that was truly radical in the political reality of this bloody land.

In all these years of finding myself in the leadership seat of these initiatives, it was clear that I needed to educate myself in how we can collaborate if I wanted a chance to build something that could last. Building community on my dad’s farm, forming an art collective, or leading activists across huge divides all came with unique challenges. Usually, these appeared in the form of conflict, power dynamics, and invisible structures that only show themselves when they break.

During the interviews for this project, the expert Ilan Meyer shared a concept with me that changed how I see these struggles. He talks about the physics of community through two types of friction.

There is small-f friction, which is the interpersonal heat: the bickering, the yelling, and the wasted energy that happens when we do not know how to talk to each other. When a community is stuck in this heat, it burns out and stays stuck. Then there is Big-F Friction, which is the energy required to actually move the world. This is the resistance we meet when we are building houses, changing systems, or creating a new economy.

Ilan taught me that the goal is not to have a life without friction. The goal is to lower the small-f heat so that all our collective energy can go toward the Big-F Friction of movement. This realization sent me looking for inspiration from authors like Richard Sennett and his book Together, and adrienne maree brown and her work on Emergent Strategy. I started traveling to Eco-Villages, Kibbutzim, and community-based projects around the world. This journey has been ongoing for almost 15 years now.

The ToGather Project is the evolution of this journey. It is an act of Regenerative Ethnography: an understanding that we have to make this quest visible if we hope to learn what the invisible architecture is that forms around building a life together. I imagine this place as a living archive of real people building real communities in the world. As many of us know, this work requires deep presence on the land and off-line. You are not going to meet village founders in a conference, and it is not possible for every person who wants to build a community to spend years moving around these places until they feel ready.

This place hopes to be a platform that will allow everyone to have a deep dive into the collective knowledge gathered for more than 150 years. We are looking at communities like the Kibbutz network, the Global Eco-Village network, international collectives like Burning Man, and indigenous communities like the Beduins in Palestine.

We are building this for the commons, using an AI-powered platform to reflect these patterns back to us. This is our version of Technological Sovereignty: using modern tools to understand the architecture of how we can build the better world our hearts know is possible.

I hope you enjoyed this little “Hello World” text. I’ve been prompted by supporters of this journey to bring my voice forward with the intention of reaching out to more collaborators. If you feel inspired by this call, you are invited to join the journey. As it unfolds, I will keep sharing the stories, the data, and the rituals we find along the way on togatherproject.eu.

Thank you for your willingness to gather.

Bringing this into your own community

The friction lens is usable today. The next time a group you are part of feels stuck, separate the two kinds of heat. Name the small-f friction, the bickering and the wasted energy, and deal with it directly so it stops draining the room. Then ask what Big-F friction you are actually here for, the real work of building or changing something, and check whether your energy is reaching it. Most groups burn their fuel on the small-f and call it the work.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

Related in the Living Library

• Emergent Strategy
• The Craft of Cooperation
• Burning Man's Ten Principles
• Ostrom's Eight Design Principles