Quote by Zab Maboungou, in a photo-installation by Sandra Semchuk

With/Out Modernity Congress. British Columbia University (Vancouver, Canada)

As part of my work within collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, between 3-6 June 2019 I co-facilitated with Fernanda Eugenio a workshop merging Radical Tenderness with co(m)passionment, exploring antidotes to indifference through some of the Dis-immunization Practices we have been creating.

We were part of a program of installations, workshops, practices and conversations that were invited into the space to offer insights into the following questions:

• How have we come to see ourselves as separate from each other and from the wider living metabolism that we are part of?
• How has the trauma of this perceived separation affected our capacity to do, to think, to imagine, to desire, to dream, to hope and to relate?
• How can we heal individual and collective traumas without guilt, shame, self- righteousness, re-wounding and drama?
• What can interrupt our competition for authority and legitimacy and activate a collective visceral sense of humility, generosity and compassion that can open up new possibilities for co-existence?
• What can create and sustain a sense of accountability and response-ability that overrides self-interest and is not dependent on transactions, convictions, knowledge, identity or understanding?
• How can we engage and be taught by different systems of knowledge and being, struggles and attempts to create alternatives, (a)cutely aware of their gifts, limitations, contradictions, as well as our own (mis)interpretations, projections, and appropriations?
• How can we hospice a dying way of knowing/being and assist with the birth of something new, still fragile, undefined and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser with radical tenderness?
• How can we tap into what is perceived to be impossible? How can we allow the land to calibrate our vital compass and dream through us?

 

Program details (+info):

June 3 Colonialism as the trauma of separability

08:00 –12:30 body attunement and affective stretchings workshops

13:30 – 19:00 fishbowl conversations: on being and separability; on petro-capitalist modernity; on settler-colonial relations

June 4 The difficulties of affective interruptions

08:00 –12:30 body attunement and affective stretchings workshops

13:30 – 19:00 fishbowl conversations: problematizing representation, inclusion and appropriation; problematizing artistic and curatorial practices; problematizing critical pedagogies and emotional labour

June 5 Experimentations in getting one’s act together

08:00 –12:30 body attunement and affective stretchings workshops

13:30 – 20:00 fishbowl conversations: gesturing beyond representation; gesturing beyond colonial hope; closing circle: towards the end of the world as we know it

June 6 Exploring antidotes to indifference

10-1pm / 2-7pm Radical tenderness and co(m)passion workshop