Will Jones
Image Credit: ORIGIN
Los Angeles Unified reported 154 languages spoken by its students in 2023. Los Angeles County holds the largest foreign-born population of any county in the United States, roughly one in three residents, and more than half of everyone here over the age of five speaks something other than English at home. The largest communities of Mexicans, Koreans, Filipinos, Armenians, Salvadorans and Guatemalans living outside their home countries are all in the same county, sharing the same freeways.
Which makes Los Angeles a strange and useful place to receive the invitation arriving on Oct. 17.
ORIGIN is asking the world to stop at the same instant. Not the same hour adjusted for local time, the way New Year’s Eve rolls westward across the map, but one absolute moment, so that a backyard in Highland Park and a field outside Johannesburg are doing the identical thing simultaneously. Organizers call it the Moment of Global Unity, and the premise underneath it is that every human alive shares a single point of origin.
In most cities that argument takes some imagination. Here it mostly takes looking around.
It opens in 15 languages
The moment begins with a multilingual recording made with Indigenous Elders representing 15 nations, each contributing in their own language. Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota is among them, as is Ouma Katrina Esau of South Africa, who at 92 is the last living first-language speaker of N|uu and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Cape Town for documenting it.
The Elders were filmed on their own lands by Deborah Anderson, the Leica ambassador who directed Women of the White Buffalo, the documentary about Oglala Lakota women at Pine Ridge that took Best Feature Documentary at the Red Nation International Film Festival.
Hearing 15 languages in sequence is meant to be disorienting for most audiences. For anyone who rides the 720 down Wilshire on a weekday, it is roughly a Tuesday.
Worth noting alongside it: the basin where all of this will be heard is Tongva homeland, and Tongva descendants have spent years working to bring their own language back from documentation. The Elders on that recording are doing a version of the same work, several thousand miles away.
Pharologanyo Easter Tlatsana, a Batswana elder who contributed to the recording, describes what it is for in one line. “This prayer unites different nations and tribes regardless of our different histories, cultures, or denominations.” In a county built out of exactly those differences, that lands less like an aspiration and more like a description.
Image Credit: ORIGIN
The anthem has a Hollywood Bowl veteran on it
After the recording comes the Origin Anthem, produced by Michael Gazzo and released ahead of the date so crowds already know it.
The headline name is Rocky Dawuni, the four-time Grammy-nominated Ghanaian musician who has played the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center. CNN named him one of Africa’s top 10 global stars, and the United Nations made him a Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment for Africa in 2018. He shares the record with sarangi player Kamal Sabri, South African vocalists Nomvula and Buhlebendalo, and King Moore, the child rapper who earned a standing ovation and four judges’ votes on America’s Got Talent.
The flagship gathering itself, Origin South Africa, runs Oct. 16 to 18 at the Cradle of Humankind outside Johannesburg, the UNESCO site where, according to South Africa’s national tourism body, close to 40 percent of all known hominin fossils have been recovered. That bill leans on South African talent including TRESOR, who co-wrote and produced Fountains for Drake and Tems, alongside Bongeziwe Mabandla and Buhlebendalo.
The producer came out of club culture
The person assembling the logistics is Chris Deckker. He founded Return to the Source, the London club night and label that pushed ritual and meditation into nineties dance music, and co-founded the group Medicine Drum.
In 1997 he launched Earthdance, a synchronized global dance event for peace that opened across 22 locations in 18 countries and grew to more than 700 events in 75 countries, every floor pausing at the same instant for the same track. Anyone who came up in LA’s own lineage of desert gatherings, ecstatic dance halls and Topanga sound baths will recognize the DNA. ORIGIN is that structure, considerably scaled.
Image Credit: ORIGIN
Putting something in the ground, here
2,200 groups worldwide have registered a gathering, and the requirements are close to nothing, which is the design. No venue, no permit, no ticket. A rooftop in Echo Park works. So does a stretch of Zuma, a courtyard in Leimert Park, a living room in Van Nuys.
The organizers ask four things: be somewhere with someone at the appointed moment, play the Elders’ recording, dance to the anthem, and plant something. That last piece runs through Seed the Dream, which logs plantings to a global map.
In most of the world that is a gentle ask. In a county that watched Altadena and the Palisades burn in January 2025, and is still rebuilding, putting something living into the ground carries different weight. Native plant nurseries across the region have spent the time since fielding demand from homeowners replanting from nothing. For those households, the instruction and the ongoing project are already the same thing.
The whole effort is anchored by a non-profit called Project Biome, and the money being raised goes toward soil restoration, food systems and Indigenous leadership.
The organizers’ phrase for the shift is from doom to bloom, which is either exactly the sort of thing LA invented or exactly the sort of thing LA is best equipped to pull off. On Oct. 17, a city that already contains most of the world gets asked to act like it for a few minutes. The odds are decent that it will.