We are a small collective of people living in the insular nation state called Japan, and on both coasts of the sprawling empire called the United States. We also have friends in many other parts of the world, and in one sense, our collective project is to nurture those relationships, and to encourage the connections between these friends’ struggles.

We are facing the immensity of planetary devastation, affecting all aspects of our existence, and likely driving all nations into a global civil war. Immersed in media reports whose narratives are increasingly dark, we feel incapacitated in the big picture of the world. But beneath this picture, we also know that the planet always emerges. As all life-forms in crisis fight for survival, our lives in struggle continue to erupt, along with the constant upwelling of waves and magma pushing through a planet that has never been static. Worlds are born; worlds are lost; worlds reemerge. So we extend an ear to the multiplying worlds, listening to the thousand voices of the Earth.

In this dark time, one thing that gives us happiness is to discover friends, whose experiences of life in struggle are as varied as living species, and whose struggles create openings in the doomed world of capitalist nation states. 1000 voices is a tool to encounter these friends through meetings and conversations, and to share their stories through translating and publishing those conversations.

Our method is based on translation in a broad sense: more than the linguistic meaning of words in different languages, we seek to convey the living sense of people’s struggles, which take on myriad forms. Similarly, our purpose is not to bring difference into equivalency, but to find reverberation in the heterogeneity of singular lives lived in relation, inhabiting their environments. Against the homogenizing death drive of empire, we encourage the flourishing interrelations of the struggles that seek to nurture and cherish life on Earth.

We welcome collaboration; please contact us at thousandvoices[at]proton.me