Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

RECIPROCITY COMMITMENTS
We are committed to making all our resources open access under creative commons and to support our artistic and research partners in the best ways we can. In the context of the current crises, we have Indigenous partners in Brazil and Canada who are in need of more immediate support. Please donate to this emergency fundraiser for communities here if you can.

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.

GTDF is also a practice that is multi-layered and rather difficult to explain, but we will give it a go.

1. It is about hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as attention to the lessons these deaths offer, while also assisting with the birth of new, potentially wiser possibilities, without suffocating them with projections;
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2. It is about facing our complicity in violence and unsustainability and its implications with the courage of really seeking to connect with the collective pain, past, present and future;
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3. It is about composting our individual and collective shit with humility, joy, generosity and compassion, trying to “dig deeper and relate wider”;
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4. It is about holding space for difficult conversations and silences without relationships falling apart;
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5. It is about recognizing and taking responsibility for harmful modern-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;
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6. It is about interrupting modern-colonial addictions, in particular addictions to the consumption of knowledge, of self-actualization, of experiences, of critique, of alternatives, of relationships and of communities;
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7. It is about recognizing that we are an extension of the land-metabolism that is the planet, not the other way around, preparing for the end of the world as we know it, and showing up differently so that “another end of the world” becomes possible;
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8. It is about dis-investing in desires for unrestricted autonomy, authority, certainty, control, protagonism, purity, popularity, superiority and validation to create space for acccountabilities, for response-abilities, for exiled capacities and for deeper intimacies;
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9. It involves learning and unlearning, disarming and de-centering, dethroning and de-arrogantizing, detoxifying and decluttering, mourning, grieving and healing, digesting and metabolizing, seeing ourselves as cute and pathetic, so that the wider metabolism can breathe and move more easily within and around us;
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10. It involves loosening our attachments to our self images and to what we think we want, so that we might instead step up, own up, clean up, grow up, wake up and show up to do what is really needed, whether or not it fits with our personal agendas.
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If this practice appeals to you, maybe you will connect with (and even enjoy) the experiments that are shared by the GTDF collective here.

Please read our “pedagogical warning” before engaging with the experiments and resources on this website. 

Drawing by Mo Drescher.

South American Indigenous Network Emergency Fund

https://www.gofundme.com/f/south-american-indigenous-network-emergency-fund

Much of the work of this international collective happens in unceded Musqueam land (where the University of British Columbia is located). We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Musqueam people for enabling us to carry out this work in this land.

We are also grateful for the support received from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Musagetes Foundation.