Trailer
Join the dialogue with various voices, perspectives, and languages.
Course modules
Layers of systemic crises
In this session, we will Investigate the tangled systemic crises and cracks in the systems that have become even more visible with the multiple collapses we face nowadays. We will dive deep in the understanding of globalised capitalism and its effects on the Global South. We will perceive together the difficulty of modernity to integrate ‘death’ as a part of the life circle and the politics of generating death for certain human and more than human groups(necropolitics). We will also create reflections rooted in Whiteness studies and structural racism. In discussion with Anna Denardin we will explore "Narratives Loud and Quiet" and with Aza Njeri the effects of radical dehumanization on the Afro-diasporic population. We will discuss topics like: What does it mean to give up modernity privileges? How another understanding of death could help in this intention? How does the system crisis invite death in multiple layers? What happens when alternative worldviews are captured by coloniality and end up perpetuating harmful patterns? Who has the right to dream sustainable futures, and express those dreams?
Intergenerational narratives and collective memory
How do our stories shape us and what is the influence of narratives passed between generations? Intergenerational narratives offer a vehicle to disseminate key information on what it means to be a member of a particular community, family and its ecosystem. This information can influence one’s sense of self, but when placed in the center it can strengthen and empower. In dialogue with Lana Jelenjev we’ll explore the links between our living narratives and those of memory: How might our continuity with past and future generations affect the way they think and view ourselves? How does collective memory create a sense of the collective? Through an interactive exercise you’ll be invited to re/connect, honor and weave the gifts of your histories and collectively practice sharing these stories with each other.
Dreaming and drawing other fabulations
In this session, we will dive into the world of ancestral dreams, and how we can rescue its multiple possibilities to perceive realities that surround us and create other possibilities for life on Earth. In the context of creating other sensibilities and expansion of kinship networks, we will meet artists Sophia Pinheiro, a non-indigenous anthropologist and artist, and Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy, Mbyá- Guaran film director. Together with the duo, who develop together several works mainly in the field of cinema, we will explore questions like: How are the dystopian futures that are part of reality linked to our inability to pay attention to dreaming? How dreaming can open up possibilities for other futures and be a fuel for creativity, inspiring us to move differently through life? What is the relationship that indigenous cultures have with dreaming?
When we tell a story, from whose perspective do we speak? Are humans the central characters or are our earthly and spiritual kin the tellers of the tale? From the outside, folktales may seem light and fanciful, designed for entertainment and amusement. But if you look closely these stories reveal rich cultural learnings, knowledge, and worldviews of the people of a place and of a time. In this sharing circle we'll delve into the power of folktales and their ability to reframe how we see the world around us. We'll touch on the influence of language in these stories and how language reclamation is a form of emancipation. Bring a folktale to share in this circle, either from your own cultural heritage or one which you resonate with. We'll exchange these tales of the natural world and consider how they may help us re/store and re/member pieces of ourselves.
Awakening: peaking out of the modernity haze
*a gentle reminder that this session 7.00pm uk time, an hour later than usual. According to Joanna Macy, we are now in the midst of the third great revolution in human history. The late Neolithic era saw the agricultural revolution, the last two centuries saw the industrial revolution, and now we are experiencing a shift away from an industrial-growth society towards one more life-sustaining, what Macy calls the Great Turning. Away from modernity's dominant worldview which champions the individual as independent of the natural world and where "universalism" marginalizes other forms of knowing towards 1) efforts to slow down destruction caused by industrial-growth, 2) embrace the emergence of alternative worldviews and lifeways, and 3) cultivate a shift in consciousness. In conversation with Yin Paradies we’ll reflect on these questions: What has kept us “asleep” and how can we “awaken”? How might we refind our interconnectedness and design pluriversal paths as we walk our future(s)? Join us as we explore emerging shifts in these three dimensions at the individual, community, and societal levels.
Life Force: Art, activism and other ways of moving
What does it mean to be an activist amidst the complexity of the crises we are facing, and feeling? How can artistic practices and sensibilities help us sense into the connection between the individual, social and metabolic bodies we inhabit? Dance and other forms of somatic work can be an important part of political change. Our physical bodies can help us practice releasing attachments to rigidity, certainty, and control, and be a portal to a visceral understanding of our interconnectedness with the Earth, all its beings, and movements. In this session, we will explore with Andreza Jorge concepts like “escrevivência corporal”, as well as ways of articulating community relations and ancestralities. With the company of Dani d' Emilia we will critically move beyond the binary of ‘sacrifice and ‘self care’, and artistically experiment with decluttering and (de)facing our modern sensibility in order to make space for other forms of co-existence.
Composting in community
Bruno Follador in "The Inner and Outer Gesture of Composting" noted that to compost means to bring things together — from the Latin composites, “placed together.” It means to compose something out of decaying material, to orchestrate all these different organic substances into a living whole, creating life conditions where different microorganisms, numerous creatures and beings can unfold. Composting generates energy and from within that space of transformation emerges new forms, composed of the elements in the compost heap. In Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016, 97 & 178) she points out that “we are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. … and that … cultivating response-ability requires much more from us. It requires the risk of being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with others.” For Haraway, the expression translates as a type of responsibility that is sustained from the ability to respond and react responsibly to events. During this session we'll find energy in the elements gathered along our journey as we explore these questions in community: How to be present with an experience that is not all the time “great” - how to experience this without losing faith? What does living on Earth in these “in between” transitional times call us to be and do? What does it mean to cultivate response-ability? Join us for this last session as we learn from the act of composting - where the most important things may not always be visible and where the old births the new.
