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October 26, 2024 – In the Work That Reconnects we acknowledge that the unraveling of the structures of Business As Usual is an essential aspect of the Great Turning and we are invited to embrace the uncertainty of what lies ahead. But how do we navigate such uncharted terrain?
In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti guides readers through layers of this inquiry and directly into the experience of tenderly extracting ourselves from the entanglements of modernity. How can we see modernity through to its end with compassion, curiosity and dignity?
In this webinar, Vanessa and Azul Carolina Duque joined us to reimagine ways of broadening our personal and collective response to the demise of modernity.
“Modernity’s colonization of our unconscious means that most people will gravitate toward what is easier, most comfortable, and most familiar, toward what will fulfill their modern desires and temporarily address their sense of depletion. The possibility of emptying ourselves of these desires, of letting both our securities and insecurities go, is only viable when everything else fails, or when we grow bored with our own delusions.” – Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti
Resources shared by Vanessa and Azul:
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
About the Collective
Towards Eldering
Composting and Systemic Change – The Gift contract
End of the World as we know it
Facing Human Wrongs Unsettling Wellness
Facing Human wrongs climate complexity and relational accountability
Collective resources shared during the webinar:
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, By David Abram
Becoming MONSTER: A Convening at the End of the Human
The Bus Metaphor
Yintah film
The first version of this social cartography
Nine Planetary Boundaries & Planetary Health Check & Planetary Boundaries
Doughnut Economics Action Lab DEAL
Lyrics to Azul’s closing song – Un Cuerpo Immenso / An Immense Body 🤎
a big metabolic body
with broken bones
in between the silence I notice
how we are addicted to the power
and to the pleasure
of denying that my arrogance
is the cause of so much scarcity
In order to heal the wound
we must cry the grief
of a world that burns
of a life-way that leaves us empty
In order to heal the wound
that so deeply hurts
we must move in song
we must care deeply for each other
It is not about right or left
It is about the depth that is stored in the roots
in the hands that weave,
in the hands that hold
those that sow the corn seeds
and the plantain, the beans, the potato,
the hands that sow the resistance, the resilience,
the winds, the waters, the bloods.
our mother earth
with broken bones
and in between the silences I notice
that we are addicted to the power
and to the pleasure
of denying that my arrogance
is the cause of so much scarcity.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa has more than 100 published articles and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies.
Azul Carolina Duque is a Colombian educator whose pedagogy is guided by her art-life practices as a composer, death doula, clown, and performance artist. Her work spins around hospicing systems that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as with attention to the lessons these deaths offer. Azul is a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF), an art/research collective that develops artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments aimed at identifying and de-activating colonial habits of being.