GTDF

"Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a collective of researchers, artists, educators, activists and Indigenous knowledge keepers from the Global North and South. Our collective focuses on how artistic and educational practices can gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures. We work at the interface of questions related to historical, systemic and on-going violence and questions related to the unsustainability of “modernity-coloniality”. We use the term modernity-coloniality to mark the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides.

In our current context of informational politics (and “infodemics”), many people seek the pleasures of dopamine fixes through selective and superficial reading of information that confirms pre-existing cognitive biases. In this context, knowledge consumption is self-serving and self-infantilizing; “sloganization” and mis-representations become the norm of information sharing; and echo-chambers charged with outrage and self-righteousness replace genuine, sober, accountable and multi-voiced inquiry. It is unlikely that we will ever arrive at a universal agreement about climate engagement and that is precisely the reason why conversations that can uphold respect and mutual learning in dissensus are extremely important.

In this respect, our collective has been in conversation with the Deep Adaptation movement in relation to Jem Bendell’s critique of what he calls ESCAPE ideology, an acronym that stands for entitlement, surety, control, autonomy, progress and exceptionalism. The critique of ESCAPE resonates strongly with our decolonial analyses of harmful ways of knowing and being within modernity-coloniality.

However, our analysis emphasizes that ESCAPE is not simply an ideology, but a habit of being with deeper affective, relational and neurobiological dimensions, including hopes, desires and unconscious attachments, compulsions and projections that cannot be interrupted by the intellect alone.

In this on-going conversation, our collective has offered our interpretation of ESCAPE as an illustration of a modern-colonial habit of being that is arguably prevalent in climate movements of low-intensity struggle, like those mentioned in the social cartography presented earlier:

• Entitlement: “Me having what I want is your responsibility” or “I demand that you/ the world give me what I want”.
  
  
• Surety: “I demand certainty, to feel safe and reassured about my future, my status, my self-image and my self-importance”.
  
  
• Control: “I demand to feel empowered to determine everything on my terms, including the scope and direction of change”.
  
  
• Autonomy: “I demand to have unlimited choice, including the choice of not having to be accountable for the implications of my choices or my complicity in harm.”
  
  
• Progress: “I demand to feel and be seen as part of the avant-garde of social change and to have my legacy recognized and celebrated.”
  
  
• Exceptionalism: “I demand to feel unique, special, admired, validated and justified in demanding all of the above.”