Where can we find opportunities we are unable to imagine?
We have started Rite to challenge both ourselves and the world around us by feeling our way toward new futures, rather than prescribing what they should look like.
RITE connects transition and sustainable societal formation – both in practice and theory.
We do this by initiating and driving processes within what we call society’s ritual spaces: the spaces of learning, law, urban planning, economy, politics, and more. These spaces are interconnected yet carry their own distinct rites and narratives.
In our work, we seek out these spaces in order to uncover and make visible the underlying operational systems, exploring how they can be transformed, opened up, or put into play – always in collaboration with those working within them.
In both practice and theory, RITE addresses the underlying thought systems and invisible ritual behaviors that have governed our institutions and societal fabric through modernity. These models and practices are often the very root of the problems that we are now trying to have these institutions resolve.
Challenge and Opportunity
Modernity has been an era of uprooting. Everything that naturally belongs together has been systematically pulled apart, sometimes even completely separated: humanity from nature, money from value, bureaucracy from community, law from forgiveness, life from death, everyday life from wonder. This has created a trauma that resides within all of us, and which is reproduced in our institutions.
In a fundamental sense, the transformation we face can therefore be understood as a healing of what has been torn apart and made invisible. The transformation is not about ascetic denial or technological innovation. Rather, it is about the joy of reconnecting with the living we have lost contact with; inviting it in and making space for it. At the very heart of our societal institutions.
Why rites?
“The ritual spaces in our modern society, such as commerce, law, transaction, and the like, are so ingrained in our daily lives that we have ceased to experience them as ritualistic.”
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of an acute crisis of climate and resources, brought about by the notion that growth and production are sacred.
Our modern society places humanity at the center of a world brimming with inexhaustible resources, free to exploit and devastate. That worldview is no longer valid.
Because we are now in a different world.
This new reality is bewildering. The ideas, knowledge, and tools we have long relied upon to comprehend and act upon the world have become outdated or irrelevant. People now fumble for both answers and instruments to understand the world anew.
This state of affairs, or rather predicament, has led us to establish the Rite Agency. Its purpose is to discover new tools for investigating and navigating the liminal space in which we find ourselves. Moreover, we seek to cultivate more gentle instruments for societal formation. At the heart of this endeavor, we have placed the rite. From this foundation, we explore the cracks and prepare the soil.
The rite occurs in the present; it is created in the now and vanishes with the horizons of the moment. Yet, it connects us to what has been and what may come. Not through understanding, but by creating space and generating possibilities. Through the rite, we bind ourselves to one another, to the past, and to the future. Within the rite, all things exist simultaneously and are undoubtably present.
The ritual spaces in our modern society, such as commerce, law, transaction, and the like, are so ingrained in our daily lives that we have ceased to experience them as ritualistic. Instead, they appear to us as both rational and self-evident. Only now, as this order begins to unravel, can we discern the outlines of the ritual adhesive that has continuously shaped our culture’s vision of the world.
Rites and rituals possess a unique ability to create worlds. They are foundational, millennia-old means of forging and maintaining connections—between our actions and one another, our future and our history.
Thus, new worlds, too, may emerge. Just so.
