As part of the work I have been doing within the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures I was invited to co-facilitate 3 days of sessions with a group of students at UBC who is working very closely with the concerns and materials we have been creating and moving through as a collective. In the beginning of February 2020 we had two days of internal sessions followed by a day open to the public, on Feb 2nd.

Below is the call the students circulated for the session:

An invitation to Radical Tenderness

This is a call within increasingly fragmented and confusing times, when simply learning about ongoing injustices does not in itself disrupt the ways of knowing and being that are born through these injustices every day. To those in grief and illusions, where the body aches stiff: Can we listen ourselves back into radical tenderness?

Radical tenderness is a pedagogy that invites us to imagine new ways of relating to ourselves and each other. Through embodiment practices this method cultivates visceral resiliences in changing realities, so that we may engage with our personal and collective pains, complicities and complexities beyond the rational and discursive.

This practice stems from Dani d’Emilia’s work with the Decolonial Futures Collective and within decolonial, transfeminist, and performance pedagogies. The work invites us to engage with multiple ways of knowing, and with our individual and collective vulnerabilities.

Radical Tenderness asks that we show up willing to stretch beyond our comfort zones from a consensual and loving, yet critical and non-anthropocentric space.