Between 1978 and 1994, a loose constellation of communities emerged across Western Europe and North America under the name The Tender Conspiracy. Operating from rented halls, derelict schools, and private homes, they sought to replace political ideology with emotional truth. Members practiced “reciprocal transparency” — rituals of confession, prolonged eye contact, and choreographed vulnerability designed to dissolve the boundary between self and other.
This book reconstructs the movement through surviving fragments: journals, meeting transcripts, architectural sketches, and the testimonies of those who later denied involvement. It examines how the Conspiracy’s ideal of absolute honesty slid toward coercion, and how tenderness itself became a form of control.
Part ethnography, part elegy, The Tender Conspiracy explores what happens when intimacy becomes an institution — when belief is built not on power or doctrine, but on the desperate wish to be fully known.