Sharon’s letter on GTDF’s closing
Modernity is terrible at endings. It has trained us to seek continuity, legacy, and even to try to outsmart our own mortality. We think all good things should last forever.
But this denies the reality of existence: that all things shape and shift, and must eventually come to an end, to make space for the new. The closure of GTDF has prompted many emotions among us, and many responses from those who have followed our work over the last decade.
Yet learning to respect the entwined cycles of life and death has always been central to our inquiry.
We’ve spent years learning how to let go of expiring stories and inviting others to do the same. So, it only makes sense that we must also learn to let go of our inquiry as its vitality is waning.
This does not mean that the questions that guided us have been answered, but that it’s time to metabolize them and make space for different questions – many of which have sprouted from the rich soil we have been tending, and from what we’ve learned from our generative mistakes.
The gratitude I feel for having had the opportunity to walk with others on a foggy road into the unknown and the unknowable is immense and immeasurable, and continues to nurture me.
Perhaps our closure can be one final offering to the wider field: a reminder that all living things have an arc of birth, death, and transformation. And that we honour life not by grasping for its permanence, but by continuing to move with what is emerging.
Endings are not failures, they are teachings – sometimes painful, sometimes unexpected, but rarely not needed. Thank you to all who have walked this path with us. May the soil we’ve tended together continue to compost, sprout, and surprise us, wherever we find ourselves next.
Text offering for GTDF dissolution
Dani d’Emilia, 2026
I came into the GTDF collective after many years of touring and teaching as a performance artist. My artistic and trans-feminist background had made me become deeply engaged in social justice and identity politics, which felt and still feel important. I had been practicing how to pay embodied attention to how power moves in socio-political systems, how naming difference was essential for visibility and survival, yet I could feel how this same act of naming sometimes reinscribed the separations that colonialism depends on. I was increasingly aware of the limits of this framework, and the need to combine it with something else that connected me to a wider body somehow. I was searching for another layer of connection, something that could hold the multiplicity of our experiences without reproducing division.
When I first encountered what would later be called the GTDF collective one of the main aspects that drew me was the orientation that Vanessa and the Indigenous leaders she invited us to be in conversation with were bringing: a shift from centering the human to centering the land. Through this shift, I began to perceive a deeper connective tissue between struggles. Specificities remained, but they were now nested within a larger metabolism: the living body of Earth and cosmos. That reframing grounded me in a sense of belonging that was wide enough to hold our contradictions. Politics and spirituality began to dance together differently in my body.
As a performance artist, my body has always been my primary site of learning, unlearning, translation and transmutation. My awareness that the body is a porous portal for collective processing found new companions and complexities within GTDF. The frameworks and cartographies we developed invited reflection and conversation, and I wanted to accompany those with embodied exercises, ways of moving the learning through my body rather than leaving it all for the intellect. This intimate feeling led me to propose several collective experiments, from creating simple physical exercises to facilitating year long residencies, such as “Metabolizing Human Wrongs,” a residency and art-series that emerged from the course Facing Human Wrongs. There, we explored how artistic and embodied practices could help us digest the material we were engaging with, and finding a translation of this process in a form that could potentially also nourish others. “It is not an informational problem”, as I’m sure you’ve heard us say before.
The collective’s methodology, where different people worked on different translations and circulations of the same inquiry, was profoundly generative. We explored how to ask feedback from one another not as correction but as co-sensing. The conversations within so many different backgrounds and sensibilities was often challenging and messy, and made us notice and tend to multiple elements, layers and relations none of us would ever have been able to do alone.
When Vanessa and I assembled the text Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness, we were listening together to invitations of a term-force I had been moving with in my artistic and political practice for many years, and that found new articulation through our shared inquiry. We harvested fragments from notebooks, gatherings, and conversations, and opened the text to others in the collective, who then helped refine it—an approach we often used in our work together. Once the text entered the world, we asked again: how can this be passed through the body? And again, extending this conversation to a wider collective body, I called in other artists to help offer glimpses of how art can activate space for moving with difficult questions. In the series Art-Life Ritual Actions for Radical Tenderness I invited twelve Brazilian artists to create rituals and performances inspired by the text. The intention was to try to metabolize collectively what modernity trains us to compartmentalize, individualize, often leading us to implode from the impossibility of doing so.
The work of the GTDF collective has always been mycelial, diffuse, unpredictable, and alive. This has been its beauty and its challenge. There were many moments of confusion about direction, capacity, and emotion. The intensity of the work required learning to be with large levels of discomfort, to cultivate stamina for uncertainty, and to build relational capacity with others and within myself. It taught me many more tools to practice looking at difficult things and offering them care. I cannot pretend it didn’t often feel overwhelming, and painful, but practicing what Haraway would call ‘staying with the trouble’ – without being totally consumed by it – has reshaped not only my work but the ways I live and relate.
As the GTDF collective prepares to dissolve in its current form, I feel a sense of profound gratitude. My feeling is that the work we did together will continue to shapeshift in each of us and in the many many communities and bodies that have been touched by it. What I carry forward is not a fixed methodology but a relational orientation: the willingness to meet complexity with presence, to keep metabolizing what feels impossible to hold, to keep my solutionist passengers in check and to trust that through ongoing practice, other unimaginable ways of living and relating may take root.
Dino’s letter on GTDF’s closing
The GTDF collective began to fall apart for me at some point in the beginning of 2025. I think most of us are at peace with it now. It makes sense, for the collective body we were and for the individuals that were part of it. Yet, I didn’t see that moment coming. Actually, while I was part of it, I did not imagine that this moment would eventually come. The present is full of naivety, and yet, that is precisely what allows us to immerse ourselves in it. Otherwise, we would be constantly triggered by past trauma and future insecurities.
How to have difficult conversations without relationships falling apart? Looking back, I think this was the question that attracted me to GTDF, back in 2018. That, and an honest intention to navigate through often neglected aspects of the multiple crises we are facing in the weird times we share: how our affective infrastructure (with its desires, investments, expectations and traumas) plays a crucial role in reproducing harmful patterns towards the planet, the other than human world, and each other. Particularly those bodies that experience racial violence.
I was also attracted to some sort of humbleness, to the intention to stay deeply involved in difficult issues without claiming to have the solution or the moral authority to define what being is or should be. Contradictory (which I came to learn is not something bad but actually necessary to navigate liquid modernity) there was also the spell. The falling for an articulation that not only made sense for me, but felt important for humanity, and also for my context, my relationships, and in a sense, a correction of the route that was expected of me growing up. Was I delusional the whole time, or was there something real in all of that?
While I was navigating the troubled ending of the collective, I received much important advice from people near me, but one was particularly valuable as a tool to move through that period: A person that I trust, who specializes, among other things, in conflict mediation and complex relational endings, advised me that when there are these kinds of conflicts, we shouldn’t look to leave the relationship on good terms, but rather in the best possible terms. They sound similar, but there is a big difference: sometimes good is not possible. That is a learning that all of us, practitioners, educators, activists, artists, trying to work through collapse can incorporate: doing the best possible thing, knowing that that may not be good enough (or how I learned with the collective, the most responsible next step).
You probably noticed by now that I carry some disappointment, not because things ended but how things ended. I think we failed precisely in the affective and relational realm, that we so often champion, in how the final period of the collective was handled by us. To be fair, nothing different was ever promised. It was part of the collective articulation to state that modernity/coloniality is so entrenched in us that probably the best we could do is to learn to make new mistakes. Yet, I end up wondering if we were caught in the trap of our own articulation, and in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Was, in the end, articulating an argument, a theory, a concept, more important than the relationships that sustained that possibility?
Yet, each of us will have to decide what to make of the period we were together, and what narrative we want to or can carry forward. My current effort is to not let the lens of the endings be the one that tells the whole story. A lot was experimented, produced, tried and genuinely pursued during GTDF history. There was true investment, labour and renunciation to make this period possible. There was a bold attempt to put together a lot of different people, with different bodies and metabolic capacities and experiences around an inquiry that was difficult to hold. There was personal and collective transformation and moments where we were in synthony with the direction we were taking, what the work was for and what we were serving. And probably that is already more that can be asked of any collective body.
Regardless of my feelings and interpretations, the intense body of work produced still feels important, and in my opinion valuable to a lot of people, particularly those in despair with the times we are living in. I hope those people can find this work and both benefit from and be responsible with it.
For myself, I only have to thank my peers for all the learnings and incredible time together, say sorry to those I harmed, even unintentionally, forgive those that have harmed me, and move on, hoping to carry not only the teachings generously received, but also to carry them with sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility.
Devin’s letter on GTDF’s closing
I know I cannot clearly articulate the ways in which the GTDF inquiry has danced with and through me, but I guess maybe the vaster dance is compelling me to give it a go. When I first began seeking (somewhat desperately) this kind of work, I was still partially tethered to the hope that with enough coordination and cooperation, we might avert the crises of global collapse. Part of me had not yet metabolized the depth and duration of systemic violences, though some inner passengers were already carrying that awareness, wrapped in shame and guilt.
I now feel quite differently in my approach to what might be offered in these times of immense ruptures. I have a clearer sense of the pervasiveness and depth of the violences of our world internally, interpersonally, systematically, and globally. I am no longer in denial about the reality that we’re no longer in a position to prevent deeper collapses, but I can see we can still cultivate the possibility of meeting them with more humor, humility, honesty, and hyper-self-reflexivity. I recognize now that there is always the opportunity to attune to the grief, wonder, humor, anger, mystery, and other more-than-human companions that travel with us. I also have a more visceral sense that it is not only possible, but necessary, for us to learn how to live in joy, radical tenderness, and relational accountability as part of growing up, growing down, and showing up differently.
These days, I more often remember that it is all in motion – that nothing is fixed or bound by concepts or facts or figures or perspectives. I am increasingly aware that not only is there so much more ‘happening’ in each moment than I was ever taught could be possible. In my more grounded moments, this helps to guide my spiritual practice and surrender into being an entangled entity that is capable, at times, of dancing with paradox in ways that might bring more healing or wit(h)nessing to the moment. And when I forget, as I often do, the field has taught me to return gently. To listen. To remember I am never the only one dancing.
There are a few things that are clearer to me now: the “crises” we are facing are predictable meta-consequences of centuries of systemic violence masked as progress. The unfolding of the cosmos will never be fully articulable. Sustainable change lives in relational fieldwork, not just thought-work. What must shift isn’t just our actions, but our sense of self, and the story of what we’re here for. Ideas or insights can sometimes lead to significant changes for a short while, but deeper changes require spaces and shifts below the level of the intellect. Spending regular time immersed in relational fields that are vulnerable, joyful, grief-soaked, humorous, light-hearted, and resonant is more likely to invite deeper and more sustainable changes.
What needs to “change” isn’t solely at the level of thought or action; it’s at the core senses of who we interpret ourselves to be in all our relations, and what the fuck we are doing here in these moments.
I am so very grateful to the collective for taking a chance on me and allowing me to join the ride during the twilight of this immeasurably deep inquiry. I know now the dance never really ends, and I’ll keep groovin’ along, listening, laughing, crying, and sharing jokes and metaphors and insights as long as I can.
Kyra’s letter on GTDF’s closing
Working with and through the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective has deeply moved and guided my perceptions, ways of walking, and being on this transforming planet. Words feel tight in the attempt to trace the imprints, textures, expansions, collapses, and renewals that I have experienced with this pedagogy and its extended community. I am deeply grateful for the time we have worked together, in all the challenges and lightness. I am grateful for the support and opportunities to grow as a young human, artist, and educator.
I first joined this collective as an undergraduate student in university, urgently disheartened by the brokenness of institutions and the lack of emotional, spiritual, embodied learning that was needed to help us prepare for and metabolize the times we are in (and those to come). Finding the work of this collective was a deep sigh of relief in ways that I did not know how to articulate at the time.
As students, we participated in pedagogical experiments and place-based learning rooted in land-body, intergenerationality, spirit, and intellectual resilience. I learned how to start inhabiting and welcoming multiplicity and uncertainty in embodied ways, decentering humans and holding the “complexity within and without ourselves” in order to show up as grounded allies on stolen lands and in multi-species, spiralling futures. I learned the importance of grief and ‘collectivizing our hearts so that we break open and not apart.’ These philosophies and ways of being were also present in the worlds and cultures that raised me, and it was deeply healing to see them welcomed and taking root in an institutional space like a university. These teachings feel essential (at least to me) for the hearts, minds, and spirits growing up within the polycrisis. This letter shows flashes of the ecology of learning I have been gifted with this collective, and as the GTDF pedagogy beckons, there was so much learning in discomfort.
This discomfort was firstly located in my own body, expanding into the collective tissue of entanglement and accountability; ripping softly into grief, fragility, inter-being, awe, and wonder to drop deeper to the realities of this moment. That depth education took time (and is ongoing), shedding layers, illusions, distractions, and attachments. Throughout this journey with the GTDF collective, I also learned about the trials of locating integrity, mistaking theory for praxis, the ruptures in relationships and the ways in which we meet, or fail to meet, certain moments. I learned that all communities and chosen families have their dusty drawers and do-not-touch buttons. I suppose that is what “the work” is: having enough love, permission, communication, and trust to dance with doubt, power, rupture, and lack of communication. And as the body of this work is laid to rest, many threads loosen into the soil, still open, offered to the land, who will metabolize them in ways we could not. Deep gratitude and excitement for what kin seeds in the soil may bring. ❤ Kyra
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 