Co-sensing With Radical Tenderness

Dani d’Emilia, Vanessa Andreotti & GTDF Collective

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and …

Accept its invitation to be present. Tune in with the collective body, both human and non-human.

Take notice of all the skins and places we inhabit, the bones and lands that bear our weight.

Feel your entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken and the messed up.

Relate beyond desires for coherence, purity and perfection. 

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and …

Dance beyond the loop of identification and dis-identification, beyond what you like and dislike.

Stop trying to shape reality according to narcissistic compulsions for pleasure, comfort and convenience. 

Interrupt addictions to consumption, not only of “stuff” but also of knowledge, experiences, and relationships.

Let go of possessions, of possessiveness. Renounce fantasies of comprehension, consensus and control.

Disarm, declutter, and decenter yourself.

Integrate with a wider metabolism, with a much longer temporality than your human body.

Follow non-normative and non-linear time.

Deactivate your cravings for protagonism, greatness, and legacy.

Stop fearing fear, uncertainty, and emptiness.

Be open to the gifts of dis-illusionment and dis-solution. Surrender without collapsing.

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and …

Make space for the unknown and the unknowable, in ourselves and in others.

Seek sense-fullness rather than meaningfulness.

Allow your state of wonder to stay open, without always trapping it into meaning.

Don’t hold “being” hostage to “knowing”,

Engage with creativity beyond the intellect.

Recover exiled capacities, expand sensibilities and dis-immunize intimacies.

Notice the ways in which our thoughts and emotions are biophysical processes.

Listen to non-human authorities, and care about our relationship with them.

Be open to what you can’t and may never understand.

Don’t cast upon everything a blanket of interpretation, silence the noises preventing you from digging deeper and relating wider.

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and …

Be receptive to the teachings of your shadows.

Mourn your illusions, compost your shit, ferment yourself.

Learn from repeated mistakes. Make only new ones in the future.

Discover a whole bus of different creatures inside yourself.

Look into the mirror and release the fear of disapointability, rejection and abandonment.

Face your complicity in violence and disinvest from arrogance, superiority, and status. 

Let go of the fear of ‘being less’, the pressure for ‘being more’ and the need for validation.

Deprivatize failures, depersonalize lack. We all fuck up, we all cry. 

Deactivate your expectations for belonging and focus on unlearning the logic of separability. 

Embrace yourself as both cute and pathetic, be courageously vulnerable.

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and …

Make room for new forms of co-existence to encounter you.

Renounce unrestricted autonomy and the obsession with form. Find stability in the rhythm beneath the movement.

Activate the sense of hearing in all parts of your body, so that through witnessing we can heal each other. 

Listen to unuttered wisdom, nurturing intrinsic, rather than productive value.

Remember that our medicines are both indispensable and insufficient. 

Let us ‘have each other’s backs’ rather than ‘back each other up.’

Tune in, rather than empathize with. There’s a difference. 

Notice how you move between your comfort, stretch and panic zones. 

Increase care in proportion to risk. Do it with humility, generosity and reverence.

Dissolve the limits and weight of your body, allowing others to move through, with and for you. 

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and….

Turn the heart into a verb: corazonar, senti-pensar.

Look at painful and difficult things with the love of really wanting to see.

Feel the pain of the earth transpassing you.

Understand that the earth is not an extension of our bodies, it’s the other way around. 

Collectivize your heart so that it breaks open and not apart. Let it hold all the pain of – and in –  the world without being numbed or overwhelmed.

Witness ‘being ‘in several layers:  me and you, me in you, us in ‘neither me nor you’.

Forget being either or, be both and more and moving.

Tend the wounds created when the skin holding one body stretches and tears in order to receive and be refigured by another. 

Condition your intellectual, political and affective muscles for facing storms and running marathons in tortuous terrains. 

Allow yourself to be guided by a metabolic intelligence. Enable neurogenesis and learn to breathe water. Be water.

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and practice engaged detachment. Offer palliative care to the dystopic world that is dying, both within and around us. Digest the teachings this death offers.

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and assist with the birth of something new, without suffocating what is being born with projections and idealizations

Co-sense with RADICAL TENDERNESS and invoke and evoke – in a double and simultaneous movement  – the manifestation of a political practice of healing and well-being that is beyond what human intelligence can fathom. Allow it to come through you, forever changeable and fluid.

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Recording [Soundscape by Azul, Kyra and Nadim]

Exercise invitation [1 hour]: Play the recording 4 times. 1. The first time, just hear the song in the background, without paying attention to meaning; 2. The second time, let the sentences and words that want to touch you reach your body; 3. The third time, just move with the music and the words, as your body responds to them; 4. The fourth time, read along with the written version of the poem. Check what really stays with you from this exercise, both intellectually and sensually.

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Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness is a text Dani d’Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti began to write in 2018, based on thoughts expressed by the collective ‘Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures’.  Initially called ‘An Invitation to Radical Tenderness’, this text has been shape-shifting alongside their artistic-pedagogic collaboration ‘Engaged dis-identifications’, which attempts to translate post-representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect and relationality.  The current version of the text has been revised in May 2020.  More info on GTDF here: www.decolonialfutures.net

The text is now available in two formats, both curated by Laura Daviña from Publication Studios São Paulo.

flick book online:

http://lapubli.online/RadicalTenderness.html

+ option to print and bind DIY, inctructions here:

http://lapubli.online/imprimir.html

copies printed by the Publication Studios network in different countries: https://publicationstudio.biz/books/co-sensing-with-radical-tenderness/

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Radical tenderness is a term that Dani first encountered whilst working as part of the transnational performance collective La Pocha Nostra (2009-2016). Since then Dani has been engaged in a multi-layered co-sensing of radical tenderness’ movements on personal, political and spiritual realms. A first radical tenderness manifesto written by Dani in collaboration with  Daniel B. Coleman, previously Daniel B.Chavez (2015), as well as info on Dani’s work with RT in different performance-pedagogy contexts can be accessed here:www.danidemilia.com

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The term co-sense is used by di erent artistic and activist movements with di erent connotations. The work of Caro Novella with Quimera Rosa introduced us to an important contrast between consenting and cosensing that enlarges the eld of intimacies beyond human interactions, which resonates with indigenous ancestral teachings at the core of the “Web of 5 Cures”, whose practices inspire our text. Our use of the term co-sense refers to a movement of decolonization (Stein, et. al. 2019) that involves various invitations, including dethroning the ego, decluttering a ective landscapes, and disinvesting from violent and unsustainable systems.

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We wish to thank the founders of LPN who began using the term Radical Tenderness in the 90s as well as the many collaborators of GTDF and other many contexts in which we have been continuing to (un)learn with/through RT over the past years.