For one month, Nov 21 – Dec 19, a small society forms in city corners of Buenos Aires — artists, founders, researchers, activists, and practitioners across fields & industries, awake, caring, and full of conviction — to reimagine human creativity by co-creating a living publication out of new conversations, field studies, research, and artifacts.
*get involved or ask me about it*
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Hands at the Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas, Santa Cruz, Argentina, c. 13,000–9,000 years ago. Photo: Mariano, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Almost everything we call humanity was once someone's making: a language, a song, a city, an idea, carried on by those who received it. From the hands stenciled in the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia to a venture started this year, creativity is how a person leaves a trace, and how traces become a shared world. For a person, few experiences feel as alive as making something only they could make, and watching it reach someone else.
Since industrialization, life has been organized around one question: how to produce enough. Schools prepare people for careers, work pays for what can be measured, and platforms rank what holds attention. Creativity is left at the edges, and the work that makes a person who they are is often not the work that pays their rent.
Buenos Aires keeps it close. It is a city that cares for people: for the one who makes things, for the neighbor, for each person, whatever they do. In 1981, under the dictatorship, a theatre staging new plays was firebombed; sixteen theatres offered their stages, and some 25,000 people came.
This matters now. AI can take on much of the producing that industrial life was built around. When producing is no longer the hard part, an older question returns: what only people can make, and how we would live if we made room for it.
Creativity may be the most human thing we do, and the thing our societies are least built for. A society rebuilt around it, in how we value, earn and live together, could let people live by the art of doing anything.
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From an Ausna online gathering
Some people spend years inside one fundamental question about being human, carrying it through their own work, often alone. A cohort brings them together on purpose: people who are awake to how complex the world and being human are, and still hold faith in what humanity can become. Together, they can reimagine and rebuild that question further than any of them could alone.
Each cohort is part of Ausna, a society within Doelenia. Doelenia is an international alliance working toward a renaissance built on humanity's full potential.
A cohort turns its question into a public artifact: a published issue, made together in one month. The issue gathers those who care about the question, and everything they are willing to put into it. Writing, conversations and members' own projects all go in, each piece signed by its makers.
Many members are philosophical yet practical, radical yet romantic, and curious across every field. They meet through the work itself, and come to know each other by how their work changes once it meets someone else's.
When the month ends, the issue travels, the topic stays open for the next cohort, and its makers remain a society.
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Allen Chen
Allen spends his days building Ausna and studying at Minerva University, this semester in Buenos Aires. Before that came art exhibitions in Florida, two bands on tour and nights organizing livehouse shows, then AI and social computing research in Illinois, published at NAACL and EMNLP, which he left to work on how people think together. In bands, exhibitions and startups, he has watched gifted people save their best making for nights and weekends. He brings the question, and a table where it can open.
Samantha Huo
A filmmaker, dancer, artist, and most importantly, a human. Currently studies at Minerva University in Buenos Aires. Her work explores the intersection of storytelling, human perception, and philosophical inquiry.
Currently she is particularly drawn to people’s subjective perception - how they think, perceive, and make sense of their world. At Ausna, she leads the interview series How Does Your Brain Work?, creating space for people to reflect on the ways they perceive, understand, and eventually impact themselves and the world.
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a world rebuilding club’s live discussion
The whole season happens in person in Buenos Aires, in English, with a home online for whoever wants to keep going after.
We host small and large gatherings throughout the month, in one of three focuses:
The world building group rebuilds the topic: a group of researchers map it and each explore one part of it, drawing on the people, real cases and projects the rest of the cohort brings in, and discuss it with the group weekly. Each researcher ends the month with a paper in the issue.
The field studies group gathers stories: people who live the question sign up to talk, one-on-one or in small groups, and members ask whatever they are curious about. Along the way, members meet remarkable people, are inspired by them, and help what those people know reach others.
The project group brings projects: three times in the month, they share where it stands with a small circle and hear what it stirs in others. They leave with sharper work, lessons from the other projects, and companions who know what they are building.
The essays, interviews, project journals, table write-ups and portraits are published together as one picture of the question, every piece signed by the people who made it. From there, the society continues with Ausna across the world.
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Wednesdays from Oct 28 · 19:30 — A table. Six to ten people who live in Buenos Aires, one question, mate on the table. Bring one thing from your own work that touches it; half-formed is welcome. Each evening is written up, and your part goes out only with your yes.
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We are looking for people to
Fill out the form below or write to Allen with one line about your specific interest to join, by Sun Nov 15. You’ll hear back within 48 hours.
[email protected] · whatsapp +1 561-229-9890
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Ausna — a Doelenian project
A society to explore & foster what humanity can become. Au- means human; -sna, the traces we leave — Ausna is what a human leaves to the world.
We believe humanity is the greatest work we leave to the world, and that its future emerges between people. Ausna gathers the people who carry it and grows it together, so it can take root and make the impossible possible.
Within it, we cultivate each person's humanity, rebuild the topics the world has left unexplored, and carry forward the projects that reach toward what humanity can become.
706 Youth Space — digital community partner
706 Youth Space is a youth-led self-organized community that promotes a “co-build, co-govern, co-share” model, with a decentralized structure and a globally distributed presence. It has incubated a series of communities, projects, and spaces, and—with an open, inclusive attitude—has welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world, including students, office workers, NGO workers, gap-year travelers, university professors, and digital nomads.
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