“How does a gathering become a “happening”, that is, greater than the sum of its parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds - and new directions - may emerge.

Everyone carries a history of contaminations; purity is not an option.

One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.”

-Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, pg. 41 (emphasis mine)