Gesturing towards Decolonial Futures

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures is an international collective engaged in artistic, cartographic, pedagogical and relational experiments that ‘aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures’. Much of the work is based out of Musqueam land, where the University of British Columbia is located. 

Conscious of the multiple and varied diagnoses of the present – and the proliferation of many visions of preferred futures – the collective seeks not only to imagine but to enact the world differently, and to address what they regard as the deep roots of an underlying illness: namely – 

A global modern-colonial imaginary in which being is reduced to knowing, profits take precedent over people, the earth is treated as a resource rather than a living relation, and all of the shiny promises of states, markets, and Western reason are subsidized by the disavowed harms of impoverishment, genocide, and environmental destruction.

See website.

1. Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires, a multi-year arts initiative designed to place Indigenous arts at the centre of the Canadian arts system. 

For the collective, decolonization is not an event nor is it a formula but a complex, multifaceted life-long and life-wide practice that offers no assurances. For the collective, simply learning about colonial power relations does not in itself necessarily disrupt the dominant frames of knowing and being of colonial-modernity that are, themselves, constituted through these relations: 

Thus, artistic and pedagogical practices of hospicing/midwifery offer complementary tools and strategies that may interrupt the power of this knowledge regime and thereby loosen its grip on our individual imaginations and our collective imaginary. In doing so, they open the possibility of pluralizing not only what we know, but also how we know and who we are, so that we might learn to know and be otherwise. But this is merely a possibility, not a guarantee.

GTDF is also a ‘practice’ about ‘hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity’ ‘while also assisting with the birth of new, potentially wiser possibilities’. The collective seeks to hold space for difficult conversations and silences without relationships falling apart, recognising and taking responsibility for harmful mod- ern-colonial habits of being ‘in ourselves and around us’ that cannot be stopped by the intellect, by good intentions and by spiritual, artistic or embodied practices alone.

Participants seek to interrupt modern-colonial addictions, including addictions to the consumption of knowledge, of self-actualization and of experiences, and dis-investing in desires for unrestricted autonomy, authority, certainty and control, while creating validation to create spaces of accountability and response-abilities, for exiled capacities and for deeper intimacies.

GTDF’s decolonial perspective is informed and inspired by ‘Indigenous’ analyses and practices that affirm that the current global problems are not related to a lack of knowledge but to an inherently violent modern colonial habit of being, structured by four denials:

 - The denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm (the fact that our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation somewhere else);

 - The denial of the limits of the planet (the fact that the planet can not sustain exponential growth and consumption); 

- The denial of entanglement (our insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land rather than “entangled” within a living wider metabolism that is bio-intelligent); and

 - Denial of the depth and magnitude of the problems that we face: the tendencies 1) to search for “hope” in simplistic solutions that make us feel good/look good; 2) to turn away from difficult and painful work.

Each of these denials has been mapped onto the dimensions of ‘violence’, ‘unsustainability, ‘entanglement’ and levels of preparedness to recognise the ‘depth’ of problems.

Website: https://decolonialfutures.net/

Suggested reading: Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social

activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

Key words: ‘hospicing modernity’, coloniality, decolonial futures, knowledge regimes and pluralization, dimensions of denial.

Links to wellbeing economy: ‘Global modern colonial imaginary’, decolonial, systemic violence and appropriation.

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, an arts and research collective1, have created a list of seven ‘responsibilities’ related to intellectual and affective labour to guide collective experimentations. These responsibilities are to be considered in the practices of storying the past, living the present and weaving new futures. They are offered in a gesture of support to balance political mobilizations and existential entanglements. They might offer a starting point for our Community of Practice: prefigurative orientations that might invite, invoke and excite compelling futures: 

Relational responsibility: Recognizing the persistence of systemic separations and inequalities, and working toward healing, reimagining, and regenerating relationships and modes of social re/production that honour both interdependency and autonomy, so as to ultimately dismantle inherited social, economic, political and epistemological divides; 

Trans-local responsibility: Rethinking uni-directional flows of knowledge and paternalistic notions of progress and development by rooting practices in local, community-centred contexts, problems, and solutions, while also attending to global contexts and structures, and the interdependency of all beings, recognizing that a change in one place affects change elsewhere and that our ethical obligations are boundless; 

Pluri-vocal responsibility: Considering how to ethically engage and be affected by different ways of knowing and being while respecting the integrity of each, the unique gifts they offer, acknowledging limitations and potential tensions between them. Challenging the dominance of Western rationality, Enlightenment humanism, and liberal frameworks of justice that dominate in mainstream ethics traditions and theories of change, while recognizing the difficulties and complexities of doing so; 

Intergenerational responsibility: Cleaning up the literal and figurative toxicity of harmful and extractive social-ecological relations that compromise the possibility for life in the present and future, and fostering relationships and forms of social-ecological organization that can uphold and regenerate the material, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing of present and future generations of all beings; 

Experimental responsibility: Recognizing that all strategies of transformation have gifts, risks, and limitations and thus should: be crafted and enacted with both short- and long-term considerations; be subject to thorough analyses of possible effects on different populations, but without utility-maximization and with a recognition of the role of uncertainty; be rooted in a commitment to depth, curiosity, and see failure as important and generative; be engaged with constant reflexivity and re-evaluation, rather than be understood as closed resolutions; 

Self-reflexive responsibility: Taking seriously the complexities, complicities, difficulties and paradoxes of doing this work by naming and denaturalizing power dynamics and structures of harm, tracing and historicizing different approaches to addressing shared problems, identifying points of tension and competing investments, and identifying and interrupting circular patterns of problem solving and critique; and

Improvisational responsibility: Being able to throw plans and manifestos out of the window and to rethink responsibilities from scratch in order to be present to walk, breathe and dance with what is in front of us, with sensitivity towards different temporalities, sensibilities, and constellations of power and affect, and the unexpected, while remaining attentive to possibilities for mobilizing productive interruptions, and committed to deep listening and learning in order to make only different mistakes.