Decolonial Visions is an independent virtual space publishing expressions of sight and sound.
What is a decolonial vision?
Decolonial visions are expressions that deconstruct or (re-)imagine beyond the confines of coloniality that have gained considerable authority over how we understand the world around us. Decolonial visions are those expressions which open new avenues for us as people to sense in ways that deconstruct or decenter colonial ways of sensing. Such visions therefore have the power to shift how we perceive, interpret, and relate to the world.¹
Why visions?
One of the founding principles of decolonial visions is a focus on concise and brief expressions that reflect upon various phenomena of the modern colonial world in ways that prioritize education for all. This means prioritizing reflections that focus on clarity and brevity. While a decolonial vision can be anything which is envisioned, whether shared or not (some may be more powerful if unshared or saved), this site seeks to elevate those expressions which can be displayed or published in ways that focus on outreach over traditional academic metrics.
Why does decolonial expression matter?
Being disempowered and characterized as discardable under the colonial order means being forced to navigate violent institutions (and those who uphold them) while surviving every day. Creating and sharing our expressions can help us sense, feel, and envision in ways that strengthen our resilience to sustain ourselves amidst this immense violence. This is one action we can take or method we can use to approach how we navigate our everyday reality.²⁻³
Because colonial norms (such as the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ or ‘animal’, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and Eurocentrism) are interrelated, embedded, and often go unquestioned in our everyday lives,⁴ decolonial visions may challenge us, especially if we are new to decolonial approaches. Rooted in what has been made to be abject,⁵ they may provoke us to question our reality. They may ask us to remember the disturbing truths of coloniality.⁶
Reflecting on these difficult considerations means cultivating a different way of seeing, knowing, and being in the world. Creating and sharing space that centers these expressions is one way we can teach each other to understand how and why we know what we know.⁷⁻⁹ Decolonial expressions inspire us to approach how we relate to our Earth, each other, and all lifeforms in ways that are transformative, regenerative, and sustainable rather than destructive and unsustainable.¹⁰
Notes
Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez (2013) remark that “the modern / colonial project has implied not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception.” Mignolo and Vazquez see decolonial aesthesis “as a re-valuation of what has been made invisible or devalued by the modern-colonial order.”
In “Making a Way Out of No Way“ (2016), Tourmaline states “we need an abundance of strategies to navigate and to sustain us; some of those are looking at the structures and systems that are designed to control and kill us and dismantling them; some of those are about changing policies to make things a little bit better; and other of those are about building and dreaming beyond the current ideologies and institutions [to] help us through these moments of immense amounts of violence.”
Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (2016) state “we need a wide range of diverse actions; each play a part in the broader project of achieving justice. For that reason, even small, symbolic, and everyday actions are significant and therefore need to be thought through carefully. While focusing on small actions puts us in danger of feeling that we have ‘done enough’ (thereby avoiding the larger decolonizing actions that need to take place), discounting them not only risks creating a sense of powerlessness and despair, but also misses the potential of micro-actions to ripple, to erode, and to subtly shift.”
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) states “...the demand for taxonomical and hierarchical races is foundational to the project of assimilating newly ‘discovered’ plants and nonhuman animals into a system, as the vastness of nature would overwhelm and exceed the limits of the time and location’s reigning epistemological frame (but not its appetite for mastery)” (24-25).
Leticia Alvarado (2018) characterizes “abjection as an aesthetic strategy” that centers “nonassimilative irreverence.” Alvarado states that “...an aesthetic of abjection [non-assimilative] can indicate a point beyond what is currently known, provoked, or arrived at through negative affect.”
Donna Harraway (2016) asks us to “stay with the trouble” or to “become capable” in “mixed-up times” that are “overflowing with pain and joy.” Harraway states that “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present.”
Carolin Overhoff Ferreira (2019) states: “This is also why western epistemology could learn from a decolonial perspective: it could understand art as the third space, extra-mental and extra-object, that it has always been - both in theory and practice - in so-called a-historical societies. [...] There are obviously many ways we can react to an artwork or partake in activities that are designed to create a third space, expressing and having an impact on people’s way of seeing and understanding the world. [...] I believe, like the German writer Friedrich Schiller, in the emancipatory potential and, like the Brazilian shaman Davi Kopenava, in the spiritual dimension of the third space. [...] I hope that this will foster a decolonial, that is, a non-Eurocentric epistemology for art studies in the future.”
Martha Gonzalez (2020) refers to the aesthetic practice of convivencia as “the mindfulness of presence with others.” - “Being present and engaging together in mind, body, and spirit via participatory music and art practice, convivencia has become an invaluable code of ethics in artivista philosophy.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2013) frames “aesthetic education” as “training the imagination for epistemological performance” (122). Spivak states: “My desire is to produce problem solvers rather than solve problems, epistemico-epistemological change, in other words” (135).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (2017) “approach this problem by showing readers how to pay better attention to overlaid arrangements of human and nonhuman living spaces, which we call ‘landscapes’. Our hope is that such attention will allow us to stand up to the constant barrage of messages telling us to forget - that is, to allow a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist. We also face a barrage of messages that tell us to keep moving forward, to get the newer model, to have more babies, to get bigger. There is a lot of pressure to grow.”