A retreat series dedicated to the practice of living in a world on fire.

Refugium 1:
Ignorance as Politics

Fee: US$600

Apply now.

To ensure consideration, please apply by June 30th.

Questions? Write us.

Refugium brings people together in groups of five to 15 to read experimental fiction, watch slow cinema, listen to audio art, and support one another in the cultivation of exploratory habits of thought. We meet on calls, on chat — and, from time to time, in person.

We believe that thinking — or writing or making things or simply living — should be an exploratory practice: a practice of disorientation, of discomfort, of awkwardness. It should be like walking out on a tidal flat at dusk, only to find, as the light goes and the tide comes in, that you have lost your sense of which way the shore lies, that your shoes have floated out to sea, that you have stepped on something stinging. It should be like stumbling around in the dark when you know there is no light switch to be found.

If there is hope to be had for the human clade, it lies in the cultivation of an exploratory attitude, an embrace of the awkward, an embrace of that which resists closure, audit, the managerial impulse. There are fewer and fewer such places today. Refugium aspires to be one of them.

Our first course, Ignorance as Politics, gets underway the third week of July.