The Community. Nora Bateson & Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. From Kinship Week 5.

This week we will explore how community creates belonging and kinship, and how it can also fracture it (building on lessons learned from the previous week). What, exactly, comprises a community? How does kinship come into this? Can there be community without kinship? What might community mean in the contexts we find ourselves in? How does community go beyond sentimental images of sitting around a campfire? Can we be in community with those who are "not like us"? We will also explore being in community with the more-than-human later in the course. We want to understand how community tugs at the thresholds between the individual and the collective - how does this tension affect the quality of our relationships?

Session 13: Nora Bateson: Warm Data & The Ecology of Communities

The romanticism around the word “community” is both a hindrance and an invitation to attend the core of human relationships. People need people. But have you ever lived in an “intentional community” – have you experienced the vitriol and the pain of those ideals as they turn in on themselves? Community is a word that can easily get tied into making models for people to live within that work like over-sized chore wheels. When that happens, they go rancid. Community is also a word that could be held more like a forest, an ecology—a living system. But what would that look like? How about an un-intentional community? Through the work we have been doing with Warm Data all sorts of fascinating insights have arisen around what the trendy tropes of “collaboration” and “community” could become. Some are weird and wonderful, others are cynical and colonized. How does perception play into the process of making community? How many communities do we each live within already? Is there something already there—like an ecology of communities? Municipal communities, pet communities, online communities, sports communities, dietary communities, sexual communities, geographical communities, shared illness communities, religious or spiritual communities, musical communities, hobby communities, shared trauma communities. What would it mean to explore the notion of community as a wild-ing of inter-generational, inter-cultural, and inter-species relationships? To do so would entail a rigorous attention to the presuppositions that the last several hundred years have grooved into the idea of community. Breaking the spell of those epistemological habits that have people repeatedly seeking a top-down structure for what a community could be. Instead of thinking of this concept in the grammar of nouns… let’s make it a verb. What is communing in a changing world?

Session 14: Carolina Duque & Vanessa Andreotti: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

The political and ontological dimensions that sustain the illusion of separation is one of the main inquiries of the GTDF collective. In this session, we will dive into the relational, affective and cognitive nuances of how modernity/coloniality has impacted our political and metaphysical conceptualizations of kinship. If we are connected with all entities of our bio-intelligent planet, including past and future ancestors, then it also means we are entangled with colonialism, indigenous genocide, racism, and climate collapse amongst other systemic violence. Our entanglement, thus, calls for a sense of accountability that can only be achieved through a re-calibration of our neuro-physiological addictions to narcissism and perceived entitlements. It calls for an orientation towards a more sober, mature, and responsible way of being and relating that gestures towards a political practice of healing and well-being for those systems that are dying and those that are yet to emerge.