Preparing for the end of the world as we know it

 

Gesturing in the direction of Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a collective of researchers, artists, educators, activists and Indigenous know-how keepers from the global North and South. Our collective makes a speciality of how inventive and educational practices can gesture toward the possibility of decolonial futures. We paintings at the interface of questions associated with historical, systemic and on-going violence and questions associated with the unsustainability of “modernity-coloniality”. We use the time period modernity-coloniality to mark the reality that modernity cannot exist with out expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides.

Drawing on Indigenous evaluations and practices from the communities we collaborate with in Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Canada, we endorse that a decolonial destiny calls for a distinctive mode of (co-) existence as a way to most effective be made viable with and through the cease of the sector as we realize it, which is a international that has been constructed and is maintained by means of extraordinary sorts of violence and unsustainability.

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there's a popular saying in Brazil that illustrates this insight. It states that, in a flood state of affairs, it's far handiest whilst the water reaches humans’s hips that it will become viable for them to swim. earlier than that, with the water at our ankles or knees, it's far handiest feasible to stroll, or to wade. In different words, we would best be able to learn how to swim – this is, to exist in another way – once we have no other desire. but within the period in-between, we can prepare by way of gaining knowledge of to open ourselves up to the lessons of the water, in addition to the lessons of those who have been swimming for his or her lives against more than one currents of colonial violence.

certainly, what those of us in low-depth struggles within the worldwide North (and the North of the global South) call social and ecological fall apart is already an everyday truth for lots Indigenous human beings in excessive-depth (also high risk and excessive stakes) struggles. these groups are swimming towards the equal colonial violence that subsidizes and sustains the establishments, comforts and securities that most folks in low-intensity battle combat to hold, even as the water tiers preserve to upward push in our personal and different contexts.

within modernity-coloniality, initiatives addressing the weather disaster, like Transition cities, Degrowth, 350.org, Doughnut Economics, Extinction revolt and Deep variation, have approached in a different way the question of whether or not or now not (and the way) to talk approximately the ability, likelihood or inevitability of social and ecological collapse. this article is a contribution to conversations approximately this question. It gives a synthesis of the work of Indigenous students and activists who see the need to prepare for the incoming flood of demanding situations because the structures of modernity-coloniality start to falter. It also offers a social cartography of styles of analyses and propositions in weather alternate actions initiated in the West that would spark exclusive insights and conversations about the tensions and bounds of present day-colonial types of debate, courting constructing and lifestyles.

Drawing on an on-going conversation between the GTDF collective and the Deep model movement, the conclusion problems an invite for the interruption of dangerous desires and attachments to modernity-coloniality in order that we are able to develop up and show up in another way to the difficult work that we need to do together as we collectively face the gradual collapse of the residence of modernity, or, in different words, the quit of the world as we comprehend it.