Landing with the land differently – an invitation

by : Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (2025)

See also “Breaking Modernity’s Spells: A Methodology for Naming the Shenanigans and Landing Differently”

Preamble: Naming the Shenanigans

There is a game at play.
A game that looks like care, sounds like reckoning,
and moves like change—but is none of that really.

Modernity plays this game masterfully.
It takes even the most well-intended moments
and metabolizes them into currency,
into performance,
into something that can be used to prove moral worth,
rather than deepen relational accountability.

In Brazil, there is a word for this: malandragem.
Not just cleverness, but strategic cleverness—
a survival skill, a trickster’s art,
a way of bending the rules when the rules are unjust.

But like any strategy, it depends on how it’s used.

Malandragem can be medicine—
the sly maneuvering that allows people to outwit oppressive forces,
to make space for dignity where none was given.

And malandragem can be poison—
the smooth evasion of responsibility,
the ability to perform care while avoiding consequence,
the kind of cleverness that makes you untouchable, and never accountable.

Modernity is a master of this second kind of malandragem.
It has perfected the art of making even reckoning feel productive
while ensuring that nothing truly changes.

It turns grief into branding.
It turns justice into metrics.
It turns land acknowledgments into rituals of plausible deniability.

Modernity whispers:
“Say the words, get the points, move on.”
“Perform the currency loudly enough, and no one will ask what you’ve actually shifted.”

It is convincing. It is efficient.
And it keeps us from feeling what actually needs to be felt.

But here, today, we try something different.

Before this moment becomes another transaction—
we name the shenanigans.

Not to shame.
Not to police.
Not to posture in superiority, or innocence or purity,

But to try to interrupt the spell.

To loosen the grip of modernity’s smooth maneuvers.
To create a space where we might actually land.
Not on the surface.
Not in performance.
But in right-relation.

With the land and the shit waiting to be composted.

The Naming, The Greeting, The Invitation

Look at your hands.
Not just as hands,
but as land in motion.

The minerals in your bones, the iron in your blood,
the water moving through you—none of it yours,
all of it borrowed, all of it belonging elsewhere before you.

Now, look at the hands of another.
See the land in them too.
In the gesture of reaching,
in the movement of touching, of greeting,
in the meeting of palms that have shaped, taken,
offered, and carried histories unknown to us.

Look at your feet.
Feel their weight on the ground.
This ground that has carried more than you will ever know.
Including feet that walked before colonialisms set in.

Feet that arrived here in shackles
Feet that ran when there was nowhere safe to run.
Feet that stood their ground,
feet that never made it home.

This land remembers.
Even when we forget.
Even when we rename.
Even when we pave over the knowing.

And yet—

The land still moves inside us.
Inside the roads, inside the buildings,
Inside the technology that destroys and distracts,
Even inside colonial languages, dreams and aspirations presented as benevolent,
It shifts, breathes, pulses—
holding all that has been, all that will be.

And so—

Before we begin,
before we fall into the rhythm of polished acknowledgment,
before we let modernity metabolize this moment into currency—

Let’s name the shenanigans.

Let’s name the way we slip away from the work—
through urgency, through exhaustion, through over-intellectualizing,
through tearing each other down,
through seeking a purity that does not exist.

Let’s name the way righteousness can become another kind of erasure.
The way self-importance can become another kind of forgetting.
The way even the best intentions can get caught
in the gravitational pull of “look at me being a good person!”

And still—

Let’s name the invitation.

To be here not to police each other.
To be here not to posture, to prove, to convince, to impose.
To be here not to escape into self-righteousness, or guilt, or moral games.

But to be here to compost.

To turn over what is stagnant.
To break down what is rotting.
To get our hands in the dirt—
not as saviors, not as martyrs,
but as part of a metabolism much older than we are.

Because the land is not just under us.
It is in us.
It is in the power we fear and desire,
in the systems we resist and depend on.

And the land does not need our permission to speak.

It speaks in soil and stone.
It speaks in wind and water.
It speaks in static and signal, in the interference that jolts us awake.

So today, we are trying
to offer a different kind of recognition.

One that is not a flat surface, but a moving hologram.
Not a slogan, but a call for depth.
Not a single answer, but a facet of a greater mystery.

To see the land within and around us—
as alive, as communicating, as nudging, as channeling its call through our bodies.

To listen.
To feel.
To witness and move the pain that got stuck unprocessed
without drowning in sadness,
without burning in anger,
without escaping into righteousness,
without turning away.

To stay, with more moving layers of complexity.
To let the body guide what the mind resists.
To trust that even in the discomfort,
even in the unraveling,
there is something waiting to be composted,
something waiting to sprout and bloom.

And so—

Not because we are ready.
Not because we have the answers.
Not because we have purified ourselves of the shenanigans.

But because the body is already yearning to move differently.
To land differently.

You can join this collective inquiry-dance.

Or just observe, sit with it.
Or shake your head and roll your eyes.
Or laugh, because laughing is part of metabolizing too.

Either way, we are here.
The land is a yapper…
It is singing, laughing, crying, shitting, farting, screaming,
and, if you have not noticed yet, kicking our ass.

In response, how will we use this sacred time together?