In this unit, you are invited to engage with the works of artists who are part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research collective. We have chosen these examples due to their potential to support a political practice of healing and wellbeing focused on de-centering, disarming, decluttering and dis-investing from harmful desires.

1. Dani d’Emilia’s “co-sensing with radical tenderness” (2020) is based on thoughts expressed by the collective ‘Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures’.  Initially called ‘An Invitation to Radical Tenderness’, this text has been shape-shifting alongside their artistic-pedagogic collaboration ‘Engaged dis-identifications’, which attempts to translate post-representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect and relationality.

2. Haruko Okano’s “The Haruko Accord ” (2019)  can be used for pedagogical and/or artistic collaborative processes that aim to interrupt harmful habits of being related to systemic, historical and on-going violence, and to patterns of unsustainability. The accord centers the land-metabolism that we are part of, rather than human perceived entitlements for purpose, self-realization or meaning – as it calls us to engage in a collaborative effort to take responsibility for composting individual and collective “shit” together.

3. Azul and Kyra Royo Fay’s “Agua, piel y sal” is an artistic collaboration between Kyra Royo Fay and Azul Carolina Duque inspired by the “co-sensing with radical tenderness text”

What do the three artistic practices/invitations move in you? What do they ask you to do? How could they  help you develop your own political practice of healing and wellbeing not grounded on the 5Es of exceptionalism, expansion of entitlements, externalization of blame, ego-empowerment and exaltedness?