We live in times of profound polycrisis, where overlapping ecological, social, and spiritual challenges converge in ways that feel increasingly difficult to navigate. Beneath these crises lies a deeper meta-crisis—a dis-ease rooted in the sensibility of modernity-coloniality and its underlying logic of separability. This dis-ease drives the fractures—the separation—between humans and the more-than-human world, between ourselves and each other, and within ourselves. As this logic unravels, it demands not only intellectual acknowledgement but also embodied, relational, and creative responses.
For years, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective has been exploring these themes, which have become central to Facing Human Wrongs, a course developed to help confront the complexities of global change and to cultivate cognitive, affective, and relational resilience based on the acknowledgement of four foundational denials upheld by modernity: the denial of systemic violence, the denial of unsustainability, the denial of entanglement, and the denial of the magnitude of the challenges we face. Understanding that the crises we face are not simply a matter of insufficient information, and that more will not help if we cannot expand our capacity to sit with complexity, discomfort, and the uncertainty of our times, the work has also required moving beyond intellectual engagement into embodied and artistic realms that can help metabolize the pain, confusion, and messiness that arises in this process.
This realization inspired artist, educator, and GTDF member Dani d’Emilia to create the Metabolizing Human Wrongs Residency, an initiative that explores the role of the arts in expanding our personal and collective capacity to confront the dis-ease of separability and the grief of ecological and social collapse. The residency invites artists to disinvest from conditioned desires for purity, futurity, and exceptionalism and creates space for investigating complicity in the extractive logics of coloniality, exploring ways of disrupting conscious and unconscious imprints of modernity and sitting with or moving with the magnitude of these challenges. Rather than rushing toward hope or solutions, the program—which includes both online and in-person encounters—encourages participants to dive into the messiness of composting metaphorical and literal, systemic and historical, individual and collective “shit” in ways that nurture accountability, care, and resilience.
For its second edition in 2024, Dani curated and mentored a group of 10 artists based in Europe who, after taking the course together, each explored creating works in response to the residency’s themes. This series offers a glimpse into their intimate processes, where each artist draws on their unique sensibilities, histories, and practices to explore themes such as the composting of modern illusions, grief and interconnection, relational vulnerability, somatic listening, interspecies kinship, and intergenerational responsibility. Through text, sound, movement, and imagery, their works experiment with how artistic sensibilities and radical tenderness can nourish political practices of healing and well-being rooted in ordinariness and interdependence, exploring the difficult ethical and practical complexities of staying with the trouble of repairing relations.
The series (link in bio) includes works by: Agapi Dimitriadou | Agnieszka Bułacik | Dani Bershan | Giulia Casalini | hugo-huga x tibiriçá | Laura Corcuera | Manuel Vason | Marina Barsy Janer | Niya B | Siegmar zacharias
Dani d'Emilia 