Hospicing GTDF
The account that follows is written by Dr. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and reflects her situated perspective on the ten-year trajectory of the GTDF collective. Like all accounts, it is partial and shaped by particular experiences of responsibility, labor, and learning. Other participants may hold different memories, emphases, or interpretations of this shared inquiry. This text is offered not as a definitive history, but as one thread among many that together formed the relational and intellectual fabric of GTDF.
Gesturing towards decolonial futures together
GTDF began in 2016 as a response to the challenges of engaging with four socially sanctioned denials: the denial of systemic violence, of the unsustainability of our current ways of being, of our entanglement with planetary metabolism, and of the depth and complexity of the crises we face as a species. Education that addresses denial is very different from education that addresses ignorance. When facing ignorance, presenting information is often enough, although it does not necessarily lead to behavioural change. But education that engages denial is more complex. When realities surface that people are actively trying to keep at bay, defence mechanisms are often triggered. Discomfort and dissonance can give rise to deflective, distractive, oppositional, or even aggressive responses, directed not only at the message, but also at the messenger.
From the outset, we did not position ourselves outside these dynamics. Instead, we committed to a posture of self-implication and sustained, and at times hyper-, self-reflexivity. This commitment was particularly focused on how the denial of systemic, historical, and ongoing violence continues to render emotional, relational, and spiritual labour invisible, especially the labour carried by those whose bodies have metabolized harm through survival, not by choice but by necessity, and who have borne disproportionate risk and exposure in the work of provoking discomfort and dissonance. Our work involved attempting to compost racial, class, and cultural privilege (not always successfully), while continuously interrogating how we, too, were entangled in the very dynamics of extraction, entitlement, and misrecognition that we sought to interrupt.
We were trying to create an invitation that was both irresistible and uncoercive: a call for all of us, at the level of our species, to step up, grow up, and face the metaphorical and literal “shit” that must be composted if we are to move differently and meet this moment of social, ecological and psychological destabilization with accountability and compassion. This included inviting people to stay with discomfort and to notice and metabolize the reflexes that arise when encountering truths that unsettle identity or belonging. In other words, we invited people to face the “shit” without turning away, throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel. And this invitation extended to ourselves, just as much as to anyone else.
One of the defining characteristics of the collective was the creation of an internal “creative commons”: a relational and intellectual space where ideas could circulate without being tethered to individual attribution or mobilized for personal gain. Participation in this commons required an intentional commitment: those who contributed were asked to do so without seeking credit or control; and those who engaged with what was offered were expected to mobilize it toward collective or strategic ends, not private advancement. Crucially, participation in the commons also came with the responsibility to give back, not only through intellectual contributions, but through relational care, spiritual grounding, and active stewardship of the field itself. This stewardship was expected to align with the principles of the commons: collective nourishment without personal appropriation or pursuit of individual gain.
Most of our artistic, creative and academic outputs emerged through shared labor and co-stewardship, with ongoing attention to how power and visibility moved through the work. Our collective commitment included honoring those whose bodies had metabolized systemic and historical violence through survival, and who carried epistemic insights that could not have emerged through theory (often BIPOC members of the collective); those who held spiritual grounding and protection (often Indigenous and Afro-descendent members); those who translated, adapted, extended and expanded the work across different registers (including academic, professional, artistic and institutional registers, and across sectors and disciplines); and those who carried the work into the world through stewardship and dissemination in multiple formats and to diverse audiences (including the facilitation of workshops, courses, and other learning spaces).
As a group, we were learning together how to create shared “containers” for cognitive, affective, and relational educational-artistic experimentation. These containers were meant to be holding spaces, not for certainty, but for risk. We wanted to try things out, to reflect together on what happened, and to ask: Did something shift? Were our expectations reinforced, disrupted, or undone? What did we learn, not just about the content, but about ourselves, each other, and the conditions that shaped the experiment? These containers were never about getting it right, but about inviting people into collective vulnerability: staying open just long enough for something to happen, before emotional defenses closed the space back down.
GTDF highlights
Across the life of GTDF, there were many phases of practice and inquiry that stand out as highlights: periods in which the inquiry felt deeply alive, reciprocal, and grounded in relationships that extended beyond the collective itself.
One of the most significant of these was our long-term collaboration with Teia das 5 Curas, a network of around ten Indigenous communities in Brazil and Peru. Through this relationship, the collective was offered education in ecological entanglement and wholistic justice through five interconnected dimensions of healing: the healing of our thinking (cognitive justice), our feeling (affective justice), our relationships (relational justice), our exchanges and collective abundance (economic justice), and our relationship with Mother Earth, life, and death (ecological justice). This collaboration was grounded in reciprocity. Funds generated through courses, workshops, and donations from people in the global north were redistributed to support the work of these communities in the global south. This was done in reciprocity for the spiritual grounding, protection, and guidance offered by these communities for both our inquiry and the people carrying it. This reciprocal loop became especially vital during the COVID pandemic.
A particularly meaningful moment within this collaboration was the collective mobilization around the Marco Temporal Supreme Court case in Brazil. GTDF stood alongside Teia das 5 Curas during what became the largest Indigenous-led protest in the country’s history. The collective supported land-rights advocacy efforts and participated in actions that brought pedagogy, solidarity, and embodied presence together. This included fundraising to support the purchase of strategic lands, as well as equipment and training for forest guardians working to protect Indigenous territories, lives and livelihoods in the Amazon.
The residencies in Gorca, as well as those held in Huni Kui Indigenous territories in Acre (Amazonia), in Pitaguary and Tremembé Indigenous territories in Ceará, and in Pincheq in Peru, were also foundational to the formation of the collective and to the shaping of its questions, relationships, sensibilities, and priorities, and helped establish the relational texture of the work. The 2019 conference With/Out Modernity further deepened this trajectory, particularly through its commitment to co-sensing with radical tenderness and convivial practices, including workshops and artistic interventions that foregrounded relational presence over performance or mastery.
From these processes emerged a number of creative and pedagogical outputs that we continue to hold with care. These include the zine The House of Modernity, the card decks With/Out Modernity and Radical Tenderness, followed later by Towards Eldering; and the books Towards Braiding and Towards Scarring Our Collective Soul Wounds. Over time, more than 100 resources were published on the GTDF website, many of which are included in this workbook. In the last five years alone, the website received approximately 350,000 visitors and over 900,000 interactions (views), reflecting a wide and ongoing engagement with the work.
Teaching and learning were also central highlights. The Depth Education courses, first offered through the University of British Columbia and later the University of Victoria, provided immersive engagement with the collective’s inquiry. Between 2021 and 2025, approximately 1,500 participants took part in these courses, and the materials continue to be available for ongoing use and adaptation.
Another major collective effort was the Moving With Storms thematic year (2022–2023) at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. This work focused on the climate and nature emergency and involved expanding collaborations with Indigenous groups in what is known as Canada, supporting Indigenous participation at COP processes, where Indigenous leaders advocated for pathways beyond false climate solutions such as carbon trading and the financialization of nature. It also included the creation of artistic spaces around climate grief and healing, support for artists and university students, and the development of resources such as Forest Walks, A Forest Called Amazon, and the Relational Accountability card deck. The report can be accessed here.
Music and artistic collaboration were also integral to this period, including the creation of songs such as Cuerpo Immenso and others, the series “Art-Life Rituals for Radical Tendernes”, “Re-activating Exiled Capacities”, the fellowship “Engaged Dis-Identifications”, and more.
All these projects and events required extensive coordination, event planning, resource production, sustained stretching of horizons, and the careful opening of possibilities. It is important to recognize that these possibilities were opened against the grain, in academic and other institutional environments structured by colonial reasoning, disciplinary gatekeeping, and norms that were not particularly receptive to this kind of work. Advancing the inquiry in these contexts demanded persistence, relational stamina, allyship building, conflict engagement, and a willingness to absorb friction while refusing assimilation. None of this would have been possible without the collective functioning as a genuinely collaborative, relational, and strategic body through these periods..
Finally, academic engagement played a crucial role in protecting and extending the inquiry. This included more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and reports across a wide range of fields, including health, conservation, higher education, climate, settler–Indigenous relations, linguistics, philosophy, philanthropy, and food sovereignty. Among these, the publication of “Decolonizing mental health in the polycrisis: Pathways toward neuro-decolonization” in American Psychologist in 2025 marked a significant moment of recognition for the collective’s work within mainstream disciplinary spaces. Books such as Unsettling the University, Hospicing Modernity, and Outgrowing Modernity were also partially shaped by the insights gained from the work of the collective. Numerous keynotes, lectures, workshops, and artistic interventions were delivered in academic, professional, and cultural spaces, helping to safeguard the inquiry while allowing it to circulate across different contexts.
We are deeply grateful for the sustained support of the Musagetes Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Imaginal Seeds, and the many other institutions and individuals who generously contributed resources to support this work.
Lessons learned about sustaining and ending collectives
Ten years after we started, though many of us still feel the deep underlying threads of this inquiry alive in our bodies and work, the form in which we have been engaging with them as the GTDF collective feels like it has reached the end of its cycle. We come to this ending with a clear sense that GTDF’s pedagogy has not outsmarted modernity. We say this half-jokingly, knowing that many would have liked this to be the case: that something could be clever or strategic enough to solve the problem from within the problem. But our focus was never on outsmarting. We have always moved with multiple intelligences and sensibilities as situated and complementary threads, and have been especially interested in their limitations and the frictions that arise at their contact zones. We are proud to say we have failed many times along the way and that each failure opened up new possibilities for thinking, feeling, and relating otherwise.
There are moments, however, when the momentum of inquiry slows, and the coherence of the space begins to shift, revealing the need for deeper reorientation. As we listened to the shifts in attentions, energies, and modes of inquiry viscerally reconfiguring each of us, it became clear that different people were sensing different reasons why it was time to shapeshift again. The GTDF collective body is now dis-solving, not as collapse, but as compost. We know that collective movement is not linear but mycelial, and that this inquiry may continue to live through other forms and sensibilities, carried forward by those who feel called, in ways that make sense for their contexts.
What we have also learned through this process is that working in a commons across different positionalities, capacities, degrees of readiness and reflexivity, and lived experiences brings with it both deep gifts and deep challenges. While the commons was envisioned as a space of reciprocal contribution without personal ownership or gain, the realities of structural inequality, including proximity to institutional harm, and differential access to funding, time, institutional opportunities and constraints, as well as spiritual grounding, shaped how the labor of the commons was carried and by whom. As GTDF became more visible and, at times, unintentionally “branded,” we began to notice tensions between different orientations, commitments, and ideas about what people wanted from the collective. The invisible labor of emotional, epistemic and spiritual holding became uneven and the ethic of the commons became confusing over time.
We also witnessed a significant discrepancy in how certain forms of labor were distributed and recognized, particularly in relation to funding and academic translation. Securing resources to sustain the collective often relied on the persistent, behind-the-scenes efforts of a few, who navigated institutional systems, wrote proposals, and absorbed the administrative and relational weight of making the work viable. Similarly, the demanding task of translating deeply embodied and spiritually grounded insights — most of which emerged from bodies shaped by survival within systemic violence — into academic registers where they could gain legitimacy, often fell to a smaller subset of the collective, typically those more structurally positioned to operate within dominant scholarly norms.
Maintaining an intergenerational collective and protecting the integrity of the inquiry (including defending it against misrecognition and responding to critique) also required a great deal of backstage labor. This included relational tending, fielding projections and pushback, energetic holding and metabolizing, logistical scaffolding, operational coordination, and the buffering of institutional demands. Much of this labor remained invisible within the ethic of the commons, where the emphasis on non-attribution and collective authorship sometimes made it difficult to name who was carrying what. Over time, this uneven distribution contributed to strains that made it harder to discern where care was flowing and where it was being overdrawn.
Another learning that may be helpful for others working in collective formations has to do with projections of “community.” From the beginning, we described ourselves as a collective of affinity of inquiry, not a community of identity, belonging, shared worldview or political ideology. But also from the beginning, it became clear that people came into the field with different expectations and longings, often shaped by the relational scarcity and desires that modernity leaves in all of us. Over the years, many people expressed interest in joining or contributing to the collective, and while we welcomed a few into the space, participation was shaped by the priorities, needs and capacities of the collective at the time. Some stayed for a while, others left, and a few remained long-term. Across these varied engagements, we began to notice recurring patterns in how people related to the space of the inquiry, and what they consciously or unconsciously projected onto it.
Some were searching for a life-long chosen family. Others wanted thought-partners or visionary collaborators. Some were looking for spiritual companionship or intergenerational mentorship. Some came seeking emotional, political, or spiritual safety. Others arrived hoping to claim space for their own inquiry, to find resonance for their voice, to build a platform for their work, or to find meaning, self-realization and/or fulfillment in working collaboratively. A few imagined this would become the group that might live through modernity’s unraveling together: people they could one day live in community with, sharing land or shelter with, and/or navigating the end of modernity alongside. And for many, these longings shifted and overlapped over time.
There is nothing wrong with these longings: they are human and real. But when unspoken or unmetabolized, they can distort the field. We learned that inquiry alone is not strong enough to hold the weight of unmet affective and relational needs. As collective expectations and projections accumulate, the relational and structural maintenance of a space can become uneven, costly and ultimately unsustainable.
When there is no shared clarity about what the space is (and what it is not) projections of community can begin to accumulate. In our case, this lack of clarity also revealed limits (and failures) in leadership and collective stewardship: we underestimated how much explicit framing, ongoing recalibration, close proximity, and boundary-setting would be required to hold a commons of this scale and complexity. As a result, particularly in the later years, members of the collective increasingly operated with different, often unspoken assumptions about what the space offered and what it owed them, which quietly but steadily pulled the collective toward fragmentation.
Misplaced entitlements also contributed to interpersonal strain, erosion of trust, and a blurring of responsibilities and accountabilities. As individual expectations became increasingly misaligned with the actual capacities and intentions of the collective, subtle forms of resentment and withdrawal took root. Without shared agreements to metabolize these tensions, the space became more susceptible to fragmentation: not through overt conflict, but through quiet dissonance, competing narratives, and unspoken exits.
Artificial Intelligence
The inquiry into meta-relational artificial intelligence also became a point of tension that mirrored many of GTDF’s deeper patterns. As some members began to explore AI not as a tool of optimization, but as a potential space for ontological experimentation and relational repatterning, others responded with discomfort, refusal, or grief. The field held a spectrum: from cautious curiosity to fierce objection.
Much of the strongest resistance came from those concerned with intellectual property theft (especially from artists and marginalized communities), with the accelerating role of AI in ecological devastation and with AI’s emergence in violent systems of techno-olygarchy. Some members saw any engagement with emergent AI as reinforcing the very logics we had spent years trying to compost. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, a few Indigenous and Afro-descendent collaborators, who had long been spiritual anchors for the work, approached AI differently. Rather than seeing AI as inherently threatening, they engaged it as a potential ally in relational work that could be harnessed for sacred disruption and/or engaged to navigate and satisfy the procedural demands of modern systems without becoming consumed by them, which was a key cause of burnout.
The divergence was not simply intellectual. It surfaced epistemic, spiritual, reputational, and strategic tensions: different thresholds of what could be experimented with, what could be trusted, and what forms of violence or risk were acceptable in the name of collective learning. While disagreement was not new in GTDF, this moment revealed that the field, which was already stretched by relational fatigue and uneven labor, no longer had the coherence, capacity, or proximity needed to metabolize the dissonance.
The AI inquiry did not cause the dissolution of GTDF, but it did catalyze a recognition: that we were no longer asking the same questions, or seeking to hold them in the same ways. We had been speaking about the collective’s ending for quite some time, grounded in a spirit that resisted turning the work into a brand, an institution, a promise of stable or permanent employment, or a performance of artificial coherence. But hospicing a collective is a slow, uneven, and often painful process. The composting of a shared field does not happen at the same speed, or in the same way, for everyone. Grief moves in layers; so does attachment. And when endings arrive, they rarely land cleanly.
Some members of the collective experienced the closing phase as abrupt or insufficiently held. In particular, when boundaries were finally drawn, they felt harsh or sudden. What was less visible, perhaps, was the accumulated exhaustion beneath those boundaries, and the strain of holding a space in which participation had waned, accountability had frayed, and labor was deeply uneven across the team. It’s not that the ending was handled perfectly ( it wasn’t), but that the capacity to end in a way that met everyone’s expectations simply didn’t exist. Like a forest floor after a long season of growth, what could not be held was offered back to the compost, out of respect for what could no longer be metabolized in a shared field.
Closing the circle with appreciation and release
From this point, the GTDF collective no longer exists as a shared field of stewardship. Those who were part of the inquiry are now moving into independent pathways, each carrying forward what resonates in ways that make sense for their own contexts, commitments, and responsibilities. While traces of the inquiry may continue to live on through practices, and questions shaped during this time, there is no longer a shared container, succession plan or representational continuity. We offer this ending with respect for what was possible, honesty about what could not be sustained, and trust that what has been composted will nourish other forms of inquiry in their own time and place.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 