TOOLKIT FOR OTHER WORLDINGS

MA EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

THESIS

TOOLKIT FOR OTHER WORLDINGS

Daniela Fuentes

FHW | HGK | IXDM 2024

INTRODUCTION

My MA Experimental Design studies and therefore this thesis are an attempt to integrate the diverse practices and experiences I made in the past 20 years in the context of Design & other creative endeavours. Guided by the paths of an inner connection network, which I listened and intuitively followed as a compass in my creative practice, I’ve been led to iterative explorations in diverse fields, stretching the boundaries of how to and what means Design. Nevertheless, as I navigated these explorations, I owned a deep sense of connection between them, knowing they made sense beyond the realm of traditional Design.

I hope I can make unveil those paths open to the reader. The way in which they have intertwined in my life, the different experiences they are connected to, the memories they recall and the list of synchronicities they are woven to, has showed me that time is not always linear, that we are in places at times for a reason we will understand later in life.

During my MA Studies, connecting with like-minded creative practitioners having similar visions and experiences of Design practice, was an incredibly nourishing experience and an opportunity to allow those inner paths to surface, so I can hone my creative practice into a sense and purposeful direction.

DESIGN & OTHER PRACTICES

The takes and understandings of our own Design doing are constantly coloured by our internal worlds, subjectivity and personal experiences. To understand and disclose the beginning of my relation to Design, I have to travel back to 1990: I was around 8-years old, living in a freshly built suburban neighbourhood edging the tropical jungle. One of the many new hoods pushing the border between the growing urban area of the new city of Cancun and the wild nature of the Yucatán Peninsula. After school, my curiosity would often take me on my bike to explore my hood wild surroundings, only to get back home much later as the blazing sun was setting down. My mother –born and bred in Mexico City–, was not specially settled with my long absences, the Mayan words I would pick on the street from my new local friends or the bits of Yucatán accent coming up like new sprouts in my Spanish. Since I was an avid drawer since I could hold colour pencils in my hand, my mother resolved to enrol me in an afternoon drawing and painting class with one of our neighbours, Betty.

Betty’s house was like a sanctuary. Her house exhaled harmony: the colours she had chosen for the living room walls, the furniture, the order of the objects she chose to decorate her space. I was mesmerised by the elegance of her hands movements, which I observed carefully. Her universe gave me a sensation of warmth, wellbeing and peace. She patiently taught me the basics of colour theory and taught me how to use water colours, pencils, brushes. I asked Betty how had she learned herself all of this? She recalled studying Graphic Design at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

It was this embodied experience of harmony, care and love, Betty’s feminine energy and her wisdom, which led me to pursue my Design studies later as a teenager. This early childhood experience marked me deeply, I wanted to create too, worlds with the scent of that which I inhaled at Betty’s house, a scent that I couldn’t name at that time yet.

Recalling this memory brings me to visit Victor Papanek’s Design definition in his widely known work “Design for the Real World”. But more precisely, I want to focus on his reflection and definition review acknowledgment in the context of the second edition of his book:

“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose a meaningful order. It is only in recent years that to add the phrase "and intuitive" seemed crucial to my definition of design. Consciousness implies intellectualisation, cerebration, research, and analysis. The sensing/feeling part of the creative process was missing from my original definition. Unfortunately intuition itself is difficult to define as a process or ability. Nonetheless it affects design in a profound way. For through intuitive insight we bring into play impressions, ideas, and thoughts we have unknowingly collected on a subconscious, unconscious, or preconscious level”.

Reading Papanek’s comment on his original definition points the reader to an insight he had come to sense in the years between his first and second edition, namely between 1971 and 1984 respectively. This insight brings light to those aspects of Design as a practice he had previously overlooked but which later he acknowledged were profoundly relevant in its essence, those of the “sensing/feeling part of the creative practice”. Papanek’s definition review conveys a vision of Design practice resembling a living being, one which would continue to become, to evolve and to unravel beyond itself and its own boundaries, perhaps in the same way his definition expanded and evolved from edition to edition.  

Understanding or making sense of how this intuitive aspect takes part in our design practice is a crucial and urgent reflection for designers nowadays. There is that much deconstruction we can do about our own subjectivity, the values we unconsciously carry and how they are mirrored in our creative projects, but this self reflection has its own limitation too. Perhaps our own nuances surface more evidently when we allow ourselves to contrast our practice’s nuance to others, specially those carrying the emphasis and tone of other subjectivities.

Our vision and take on these subjectivity diversities has been historically influenced by the premises of modernity and the values of the Enlightenment. What we consider and see often as “good design” is a refraction of the modernity lens influencing our world view, the dominance of the above ideologies and their influence on our values. Its influence is equally important and relevant in how we make and design the worlds we live in.

During my first year of Design studies in 1999, there was a massive student strike at the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), which opposed the raise of student fees and what looked like an attempt to privatise free public education. The scale of the strike lead the Mexican government to create out of the blue a paramilitar force newly named Policía Preventiva (Preventive Police). Around the same time, there was a worker’s strike at the UAM (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) where I studied, for labor conditions demands and somehow in support of the UNAM’s student strike. One evening in the news edition, I saw on TV the Policía Preventiva retaining and escorting handcuffed the students holding the strike at UNAM. I saw known faces on TV. Those of my fellow UAM new acquaintances, students of Sociology and Political Science. These images seared in my mind.

During the strike period, one of my classmates left to Germany for an aupair stay. In 2001, following the trace of her stories I decided to go travel in Europe, I was 19 years-old and planned to leave for a month. Initially, I was received by a British-German family in Scotland, some of its members wanted to practice their  Spanish, in exchange I could improve my spoken English. I travelled with this family by car their way from Scotland–passing through Manchester and London–to the family home in Germany which was not far from Karlsruhe.

After three weeks, tired of speaking another language, I left on my own to Spain. I planned to meet a cousin who was at the time in Europe as well, before I would make my way back to Mexico. I took a night bus from Karlsruhe, I still ask myself sometimes  if the bus maybe passed by Basel on that night. I arrived to Barcelona on the 9th of September of 2001. I walked the city wandering around and looking for a place to stay overnight. Towards the afternoon, I entered a hostel and the reception desk staff asked me in English, pointing to the lobby TV: have you seen what is happening in your country? I walked in the lobby, there were 4 white Americans crying in front of a screen, I saw in disbelief images that resembled a Hollywood film. I thought it was a bad joke, and a film which could not possibly be true. Then in the next hostel they commented on the same film, and again, and again. Until I finally realised this was not a film.

I was flying with an American Airlines ticket and a permanent US Visa I had since I was 5 years-old. This would be the last time I could use it, before it would be invalidated by latter migration decrees. I would have to make my way to Madrid to catch a flight to Mexico City via Chicago once the airports would reopen their flights to the US. On the third night of my stay in Barcelona, I met my cousin. Our conversation turned around family stories we could finally share with each other only then in that setting, far away from home sitting at the Plaza Catalunya.  Diasporas start in the depth of the bellies of family and ancestral histories.

When I finally got to Madrid, the check in personal reviewed my visa. All rules had abruptly changed, I wouldn’t be allowed to fly back with this ticket anymore. Explaining how a few days later I managed to get on a British Airways Madrid - London - Mexico City flight, is a story worth to tell in a further MA thesis.

Seating on that airplane crossing back the ocean, carrying me back to my homeland, I finally had the space to safely reflect about the experiences I had. I would look down at the North Atlantic Ocean and ask: where is the line dividing the First World and the Third World? What makes the difference? If there is a first and a third, what about the Second World? I wanted to make sense of these questions, I felt them almost perforating my mind. As the airplane finally reached the American continent and flew above New York, the sky was clear an open with a beautiful mid morning light. From one island on the East Coast, there was a gigantic tower of smoke still lifting up. I understood it was Manhattan.

The Third World was not invented by the people who inhabit the Third World but by men and institutions, and languages and categories of thought, in the First World.

In the preface of his second edition, Papanek shares the context and experiences of this phase of his life which were relevant and probably the source of his reflections and new inspirations, while he equally critiques his previous takes on Design and his naivety, specially in regards to the dynamics between the developed countries and the so called “Third World”, as well as his awareness in regards to colonialism and geopolitical exploitation:

In 1971 I moved to Northern Europe and have lived and worked there, with lengthy tours of duty to developing countries, for some years. Much of what I wrote about design for the Third World in this book's first edition now seems somewhat naive. Nonetheless I have decided to let some of my observations stand in the second edition because they illustrate the somewhat patronizing viewpoint many of us had about the poorer countries more than a decade ago. While we fought against colonialism and exploitation, I and others failed to appreciate how much we could learn in the places we had set out to teach. While mass housing designed and built by young Scandinavian designers in Nigeria stands unused and unusable, these same young people have learned important lessons about how housing patterns can serve extended families, develop neighbourliness, or cement social ties into strong and lasting communities. The road between the rich nations of the North and the poor southern half of the globe is a two-way street. It is reassuring to understand that designers in the Third World can solve their own problems free from interference by "experts" imported for two weeks.

It is very possible that the lengthy tours in developing countries as Papanek recalls during the years between these two editions, gave him a new setting to do the inner works needed to reflect on one own bias, internalised Eurocentric visions, western values, modernist ideologies, colonial mindsets or racist assumptions.

It seems that after these direct experiences in the developing regions of the world, Papanek concluded that the road between the Global North and the Global South is “a two-way street”, showing seemingly to the reader that these new visions offered a new approach and an opportunity to question the affective and subjective layers determining, not only the way we design, but the way in which we situate design in a global context in relation to the “other” and the way we theorise about design too. Papanek also places Design as a practice and a tool framed by international financial and power systems, he suggests a needed review on how Design plays a role in those dynamics, complementing and pairing the affective, subjective aspect– the micropolitical– with a macropolitical setting as well.  

Around 2003, towards the end of my Industrial Design studies, the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City held an exhibition on Nordic Design. My Design school and its students were invited to attend the series of talks by the Nordic Designers invited as part of the exhibition. A female Swedish glass blower presented her work, I was fascinated by the handcraft aspect of her work, the uniqueness of her pieces. The best attended talk though, was the one held by the Design Director of Volvo.

In this conference the room was full, in the audience there were many more male design students than in the previous talks. The presenter shared his views on Design at Volvo, towards the end of his presentation, while drawings and drafts of their recent auto design process were displayed on screen, he remarked: So what is then Swedish Design at Volvo? - Design at Volvo is this, made by Mexican designers too like the author of the sketches. There was a silence in the conference hall which held the collective aroma of confusion, cognitive dissonance and awe at the same time.

During the round of questions, a nervous male design student asked: excuse me, thanks for your presentation, could you tell us from your perspective what is Mexican Design? The Volvo Design Director seemed now to be on the side of the room holding a similar aroma to the one we experienced before. He hesitated to answer while his face showed a mix of heartfelt nervousness and unease. He then repeated: for us Mexican Design is Design as we design in Volvo too.

I left that conference with this puzzle in my head: Why does a Mexican Design student got to ask a Swedish Company Design director what is Mexican Design?

I wondered what happened collectively for us to experience such a mix of complex emotions as we touched the theme of identity in that context. The subjective intricacies of that interaction between the Design Director at Volvo and the student public in Mexico held many important clues to understand how colonialism and racism affects regions of the world and its populations in oppressive ways but with different disguises.  

What is needed is cooperation that works both ways, a strong movement to restrict the financial and systems dependence of poor countries. A tough reappraisal by both sides is long overdue.

In the same preface, Papanek words show a renewed perspective on other knowledges, its relations to nature and ways of social organisation existing in the Global South. It is very likely that Papanek’s experiences were possibly connected to other cultures and ways of living, perhaps some of them correspond to what we would call indigenous. It is also important to remark that those experiences were framed by the ideologies and zeitgeist of the 60s, 70s and early 80s. His words once again reflect a mirror of his own subjectivity, both individual and collective, and a new awareness on how those experiences and exchanges with other regions of the world without a mentality of equivalence could become fertile sources of learning for western designers, and idea which certainly disrupted the cliché that help is only directed from one region of the world to the other.  The redirections Papanek shares here are tracing lines of a bigger social, political and economical system in which Design practice is embedded, a system established on colonial relationships and exploitation modes and which continues to reproduce. These redirections are a start point of orientation to understand, deconstruct and review how Design has been a practice which reproduces those modes too and how we could reorient them otherwise.  

There is much we in turn can learn from developing countries about living patterns, small-scale technology, reuse and recycling of materials, and a closer fit between man and nature. Nonwestern medicine and social organization are other fields we can explore cooperatively. My experience over the last thirteen years has shown me that autonomy and self-reliance are being realized in the Third World.

If Papanek “started his critique of design practice by bringing into focus the stark divide between a normative idea of the human, which most industrial and communication designers worked from, and the scope and scale of their actual interventions, serving humans of all backgrounds and identities” , the preface of his book’s second edition is here a departure point to dive into a critique of Design with a decolonial lens.  

     

DECOLONIAL DESIGN / BORDER THINKING

On one of the first workshops which I took in this MA studies, themes regarding racism, identity, migration and ecological crisis came up. A white male student, originally from Turkey said: But, what ca we do? How us a few Design students from Europe could change any of that? Some eyebrows raised up included mine– as I realised my colleague was unaware of the diversity of identities in the room. Perhaps this is a good point to start, with the acknowledgement that often we don’t know were to start and what to change. We are equally unaware of how our Design practice is charged with possibilities and fertile with an agency that always contributes in one scale or another to the reproduction and creation of the world we inhabit.  

If we establish a critique and a reorientation on Design with a decolonial orientation, where can we start and how would a Decolonial Design practice would look like? How can that even be possible if we seem to be immersed in a world which is based and cemented on the values of modernity, capitalism, on a system which author Arturo Escobar calls wisely “based on a dysfunctional cosmovision”. To decolonize has become a hot term and more commonly used in recent years. This can be like a two edge sharp razor: on one side it is positive if the knowledge about decoloniality proliferates and brings reproduction of colonialism into question. On the other side, it can create a certain banality to its meaning.

So what does decolonize actually mean? What is the origin of decolonial thought and how is decoloniality related to Design practice? Walter Mignolo, an Argentinian author and researcher at Duke University, offers a good introduction to the Decoloniality in his article “Geopolitics of Sensing and knowing: on (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience”. I will follow up mainly on this article to elaborate this chapter., in this particular paragraph, Mignolo clarifies the origins of decoloniality while establishing a relationship of equivalency with Modernity:

Modernity, postmodernity and altermodernity have their historical grounding in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Decoloniality has its historical grounding in the Bandung Conference of 1955 in which 29 countries from Asia and Africa gathered. The main goal of the conference was to find a common ground and vision for the future that was neither capitalism nor communism. That way was ‘decolonization’. It was not ‘a third way’ a` la Giddens, but a delinking from the two major Western macro-narratives. The conference of the Non-Aligned countries followed suit in 1961, and took place in Belgrade. On that occasion, several Latin American countries joined forces with Asian and African countries. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was also published in 1961. Thus, in 55 years the political and epistemic foundations of decoloniality had been established.

In essence, decoloniality was born as an alternative path to the political and economical narrative systems predominant in the second half of the XX century, capitalism and communism respectively. The aftermath of WWII left the world divided between these two systems, a new redistribution of borders, many new nation-states which were previously European colonies required to subscribe to one or another system. The Bandung Conference was probably one of the first attempts by countries of the Global South to question the given available options, to generate spaces where other possible futures could be imagined or explored. The works of Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) and others writers added a philosophical, theoretical and cultural aspect to the new pulsing imaginary of decolonisation. This meant that decoloniality was not to limit itself to the realm of the political and economical, but that it would extend to other spheres too, to the realms of our subjectivities, prevalent ways of knowing (epistemoloiges), ways of living and doing . As these ideas emerged, the relevance of the communal doing is remarked in this recapitulation on decoloniality as well. The communal doing, as Mignolo points here–paraphrasing Simon Yampara, an Aymara thinker– a term which will appear in the work of Arturo Escobar too, is related to the indigenous ways of doing and living still existing in the Americas. Ways which differ from the knowing, doing and living modes set by modernity.

“The decolonial opens up a way of thinking that delinks from the chronologies of new epistemes or new paradigms (modern, postmodern, altermodern, Newtonian science, quantum theory, theory of relativity, etc.). Epistemes and paradigms are not alien to decolonial thinking, they cannot be, but they are no longer the point of reference and of epistemic legitimacy. For, while the Bandung Conference pronounced itself, in the political terrain, as neither capitalism nor communism but as decolonization, today thinking decolonially is concerned with global equality and economic justice, but also asserts that democracy and socialism are not the only two models to orient our thinking and our doing. Decolonial arguments promote the communal as another option next to democracy and socialism. In the spirit of Bandung, Aymara intellectual Simon Yampara makes clear that Aymaras are neither capitalist nor communist. They promote decolonial thinking and communal doing.”

It is not surprising then, that this new emerging ideologies and imaginary would influence Papanek ideas or that they would show some synchronicity with the evolution of his work. Papanek understood that these ways of knowing, understanding and doing were of extreme importance and relevance in determining the ways we design and theorise about design too. It seems that the experiences Papanek had while working in the Global South for long periods of time could have approached him to a different way of knowing, one that happens in territories otherwise, border thinking. A term that Mignolo refers often to and which originates in the work of writer Gloria Anzaldúa. I will dive gradually into the concept of border thinking, through the lens of different authors who have wrote about what this concept. I find to useful start with a simplified abstract glossary definition which one can easily find in the Center for Border Studies website:

As an epistemological position, border thinking contributes to a shift in knowledge formation away from binary thinking and the hegemonic knowledge production of Western modernity to other cosmologies and alternative knowledge traditions which operate outside the frame of the colonial matrix of power. In the wake of Mignolo’s Local Histories/Gobal Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, a series of critics and decolonial thinkers have further developed the concept of border thinking in order to engage in a critical re-thinking of what knowledge is and how it has been produced in the Western philosophical tradition. Exposing an awareness of modernity’s underside—that is coloniality—decolonial critics focus on border thinking as an embodied consciousness and epistemic location from which reality is lived and thought.

Arturo Escobar elaborates further on the meaning of border thinking. On the notes of his article “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise”, he offers an eloquent, detailed and deeper dive into it, explaining how ‘Mignolo develops his notion of border thinking as ‘thinking from another place, imagining an other language, arguing from another logic’. It is a subaltern knowledge conceived from the borders of the colonial/modern world system that strives to break away from the dominance of eurocentrism. Border thinking refers to ‘the moments in which the imaginary of the world system cracks’, ‘an epistemology of and from the border’, a kind of ‘double critique’ (Khatibi) that is critical of both Occidentalism/eurocentrism and of the excluded traditions themselves; this ability stems from its location in the borderlands (Anzaldúa). Border thinking is an ethical way of thinking because, in its marginality, it has no ethnocidal dimension. Its aim is not to correct lies and tell the truth, but ‘to think otherwise, to move toward ‘an other logic’  in sum to change the terms, not just the content of the conversation’. Border thinking enables a new view of the diversity and alterity of the world, one that does not fall into the traps of a culturalist (essentialist) rhetoric but rather highlight the irreducible differences that cannot be appropriated by the monotopic critique of modernity (the radical critique of Western logocentrism understood as a universal category), and that does not conceive of difference as antithesis in search of revanchism. Border thinking is complementary to deconstruction (and to all critical discourses of modernity); it sees decolonization as a particular kind of deconstruction but moves towards a fragmented, plural project instead of reproducing the abstract universals of modernity (including democracy and rights). Border thinking, finally, is an attempt to move beyond eurocentrism by revealing the coloniality of power embedded in the geopolitics of knowledge  a necessary step in order to ‘undo the subalternization of knowledge and to look for ways of thinking beyond the categories of Western thought’.

I find crucial to explore the original work which inspired the concept of border thinking and to review the extracts appearing Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera book which may have originated it. It gives an important insight but coloured with a different light, one of a queer chicana author who saw writing as a spiritual practice. An author who wrote in the same book about la facultad, ‘the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. An instant sensing without conscious reasoning. An acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide’. Analouise Keating describes so accurately in the prologue of her posthumous publication, ’her theories of mestiza consciousness, border thinking, and la facultad decolonize western epistemologies by moving partially outside Enlightenment - based frameworks. Anzaldúa does not simply write about “suppressed knowledges and marginalized subjectivities”; 67 she writes from within them, and it’s this shift from writing about to writing within that makes her work so innovatively decolonizing.’

According to Gloria, ‘the ones possessing this sensitivity are excruciatingly alive to the world. Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitised (when not brutalized into insensitivity). Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are punched on the most have it the strongest –the females, the homosexuals of all races, the dark-skinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalised, the foreign.’  I find fundamental to review and at least make an attempt to comprehend the original ideas Anzaldúa wrote, see through the influence they made in the decoloniality work of Mignolo. I believe the following extract, part of the chapter La consciencia de la mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness illustrates the origins of border thinking and what it actually meant in Anzaldúa’s cosmovision:

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture's views and beliefs and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority–outer as well as inner–it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

A Tolerance for Ambiguity

These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can't hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries.. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures.. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode–nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s text holds important clues which we could use as platforms to envision what could be decolonial design. If border thinking is essential to decoloniality, perhaps to decolonize design we need to engage in a self reflection journey to review how we think about design, how do we make choices in a design process, what are these choices based on? How do we sense and what we choose to sense as we design?

My romantic love relationships have brought to my life some of the most transformative experiences to my life and they have contributed immensely into shaping who I am. In this spirit, around 2011 my partner at the time was an artist invited to perform a concert in solidarity with the people of Cherán –a town with a majority of indigenous population in the state of Michoacán, Mexico– I had to opportunity to visit this community freshly, only a few months after they had organised a collective rebellion to dismantle the log mafia which was cutting their forests indiscriminately, the cartels, the local police and the state government. They had achieved these goals within 3 weeks of armed conflict. By the time we visited, they had organised their own security patrol system and were in talks with the Mexican government, supported my Amnesty International, to establish their own local government.

Visiting Cherán strongly impacted me and left many memorable moments which I treasure with gratitude. There was one conversation I had with one of the leaders of the rebellion which suddenly turned into a design conversation. He was an avid marxist who tried to explain me how before the rebellion, they were unable to organise their community to create any social change mainly because they were divided by their alliances to the different political parties contending to win elections. They continuously saw how their forests kept disappearing, the many denounces done at the local government had no effect since, most likely,  the government was colluded with the log mafia.

A lady who seemed to be highly respected in the community, in the way medicine women are, urged the others to do something about it if they wanted their grandchildren to know what a tree was. They resolved to organise a town meeting, where they figure out their way to recover their communal organisation capacity was to forget about the Mexican political parties and to reconnect with their identity as Purépecha people.

After the rebellion, not only did they organise their own government and protect their territories from an ecological disaster, they embarked in a reflection journey. The story teller told me how now they were seeing how they had been embracing not only ideologies and political systems, but also objects which didn’t serve their ways of living. Since the rebellion, they established a system of fires in many of the corners to guard the town. They served as meeting points too and they recall it as an ancestral tradition too. As they spend more time sitting around the fire, eating as well around it, going back home and cooking on a stove based on a European design made less and less sense. In Mexico, our custom is to eat foods mostly accompanied with tortillas. They need to be constantly heated up until right before eating, which is to say we somehow keep cooking as we eat, and we can as well, use the tortillas as cutlery. Not only in indigenous communities, but in households like the one I grew up in Mexico City, going to the kitchen to warm up more tortillas and putting them into a cloth napkin to bring them to the table, is a task no family member joyfully did. As the Cherán leader shared with me his insights, we discussed and imagined, how would a stove look if we would design it in consideration of the food traditions and habits we had in Mexico. When I think about decoloniality and design, my experiences in Cherán come back to my memory very vividly.

     

Border epistemology goes hand in hand with decoloniality. Why? because decoloniality focuses on changing the terms of the conversation and not only its content. How does border epistemology work? The most enduring legacy of the Bandung Conference was delinking: delinking from capitalism and communism, that is, from enlightenment political theory (liberalism and republicanism *Locke, Montesquieu) and political economy (Smith) as well as from its opposition, socialism-communism. Now, once you delink, where do you go? You have to go to the reservoir of ways of life and modes of thinking that have been disqualified by Christian theology since the Renaissance and continue expanding through secular philosophy and sciences.

Mignolo proposes “delinking” from modernity as well as to access the modes of thinking which have been discarded by Christian theology. Cherán’s rebellion is perhaps a good example of what delinking means. From an intramodernity perspective, we position democracy as the highest standard of government, we measure governability in other regions of the world in their proximity to the ideals of democracy in western countries without regard of their particular ways of social organisation and communality. However, in the case of Cherán delinking their government from the democracy set by the Mexican State offered them the possibility to engage in a new relationship with their commons, their community and with each other. Suddenly, this process of delinking continued to expand into other realms of the social and communal which reach the field of Design practice. I find important to highlight that this expansion didn’t happen only by theorising about their rebellion but it unfolded in the doing and the sensing, in the practice of communing in a new social framework after removing their sources of oppression, literally but also ideologically. Modernity/Coloniality extends from the geopolitical, to the economical, to the social, to the ideological, it inserts in our subjectivities and affects.     

It is important for me to mention that visiting Cherán was an experience that opened my mind and expanded my experience of what “indigenous” means. While walking the streets of this town, I saw many scenes which dismantled and confronted my clichés: a young man walking swiftly up the street wearing an Abercrombie hoodie, phoning on his mobile while speaking in what I came to known was Purépecha, sprinkled with English and Spanish words. Many families in Cherán have relatives in the US. In the western world we idealise and exoticize what is indigenous for the fulfilment of our own fantasies. Often the western ideas of what is indigenous, are closer to a selfmade remake of the “noble savage” which serves only our own western purposes and reinforce otherness.   

Dwelling on what could decolonial design could be, or how to decolonize design may open more questions than give strict guidelines or answers. It offers possibilities, and points us to inhabit the creative practice by sensing the world with an openness beyond the borders we have been set to, which we reinforce and validate with our belief in them. Border thinking invites us to embrace ambiguity, as Anzaldúa explains, and to engage in a creative and thought process with the whole body, one that includes instead of excludes.

If we continue to follow the words of Mignolo, he proposes that once we delink, we go to ‘the reservoir of ways of life and modes of thinking that have been disqualified by Christian theology’. One of the characteristics of christianity has been to relegate the body to a lesser field of knowledge at its best, an aspect of human existence that we are meant to transcend and not to fully inhabit. Mignolo relates border thinking, the geopolitics of knowing with the body sensing and understanding.

Decoloniality’s point of origination in the Third World connects today with ‘immigrant consciousness’ in Western Europe and the US. ‘Immigrant consciousness’ is located in the routes of dispersion of decolonial and border thinking.

Points of origination and routes of dispersion are key concepts to trace geopolitics of knowing/sensing/believing as well as body-politics of knowing/ sensing/understanding. When Frantz Fanon closed his exploration in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) with a prayer, ‘Oh, my body, makes me always someone who questions’, he expressed, in a single sentence, the basic categories of border epistemology: the bio-graphical sensing of the Black body in the Third World anchoring a politics of knowledge that is ingrained both in the body and in local histories. That is, thinking geo- and body-politically.

In the same spirit, Gloria Anzaldúa considers the creative process and the creation of knowledge a gesture of the whole body. She describes writing as 'a process of discovery and perception that produces knowledge and conocimiento (insight).’ For Anzaldúa, ‘epistemology and ontology (knowing and being) are intimately interrelated— two halves of one complex, multidimensional process employed in the service of progressive social change’. It is important to remark that Gloria was a feminist, queer of colour writer who came from a culture deeply homophobic and machista on one side, and on another side, racist and white supremacist. Her writing and work as an artist had an activist transformational focus. She explains on why she writes,  ‘escribo para “idear”— the Spanish word meaning “to form or conceive an idea, to develop a theory, to invent and imagine.” My work is about questioning, affecting, and changing the paradigms that govern prevailing notions of reality, identity, creativity, activism, spirituality, race, gender, class, and sexuality.’ The focus of Gloria’s creative work can be a guiding compass for us to engage in a new orientation of design practice with a decolonial focus. Her spirit of social transformation and of changing paradigms is well needed in the challenges designers face currently, specially in a changing era in which modernity has given rise to a crisis in almost all aspects of the lives we inhabit: social, ecological, political, economical, ideological, etc.

How can we infuse and reorient our design practice with this spirit of decolonial transformation? Following the traces of those like Gloria Anzaldúa and other authors which I explore in the next chapter. Those who walked the path can give us many clues and insights. Exploring what and how they engaged in the sensing, knowing creating process from the borders of modernity, with an understanding of how the body played a central role in this process is to me an expansive territory fertile with possibilities to make design otherwise.

I don’t write from any single disciplinary position. I write outside official theoretical / philosophical language. Mine is a struggle of recognizing and legitimizing excluded selves, especially of women, people of color, queer, and othered groups. I organize and order these ideas as “stories.” I believe that it is through narrative that you come to understand and know your self and make sense of the world. Through narrative you formulate your identities by unconsciously locating yourself in social narratives not of your own making.5 Your culture gives you your identity story, pero en un buscado rompimiento con la tradición you create an alternative identity story.

KNOWING WITH THE BODY |  SOMATIC PRACTICES AND MICROPOLITCAL WORLDINGS

For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is not about being in your head; it’s about being in your body. The body responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to external and internal stimuli, and writing records, orders, and theorizes about these responses. For me, writing begins with the impulse to push boundaries, to shape ideas, images, and words that travel through the body and echo in the mind into something that has never existed. The writing process is the same mysterious process that we use to make the world.

Mindflow

As I sit cross legged to write this chapter, the first splash in my imagination whispers: What if Descartes would have sat with the above quote too? This ironic thought takes me to the web, to skim online researching on his famous quote “I think therefore I am”. If he would be a person in my era, and I would have heard him saying this, I would think: what a boring, stiff and limited person. Let’s not be so judgemental with Descartes, someone who is most likely trapped under the armour of collective belief, stored in the body, unable to feel. Let’s see what the online oracle tells me today: Cartesianism, origin of Dualism (like in body/mind), the hero of modern thought. As I connect these ideas together, it starts making sense to me, somewhere inside me I know, the product of ideas like those of Descartes were and are a reflection of an era and its ideologies which were framed and therefore limited by itself. I let my mind wander, it jumps back to the Christian Theology rejection and repression of the body, add to that centuries of collective trauma, the colonial project as it first colonised Europe to later colonise other regions of the world, after centuries of wars, violence, famine, pandemics, witch burnings, inquisition, etc. with no collective devices to deal or process any of the pain or grief caused by them. This indigenous author who spoke about the consciousness of the colonisers of the Americas said something similar, I need to find her name again. You guess why we live in a society who resorts the use of alcohol as a prop for emotional self regulation after centuries of transgenerational trauma? Therapy is expensive, elitist, the access to health care is actually elitist and a privileged. Even if one doesn’t attend formal therapy and finds other ways of healing, it requires at least the privilege of taking the time for it, the time for healing. Having time is a privilege.  Healing can take a lot of your time and once you start engaging in it, you realise there is more and more to dig out and heal. You start with the iceberg tip. Also, when you are healing you are not so productive, you expose your vulnerabilities. I guess, for many it is more practical to remain numb and keep going. Why am I writing this thesis in the first place? Does it make sense to put all these words together for them to land to unwelcoming landscapes threatened by their disrupting nature? But the Earth is shouting and the life is dying, and we, or I, cannot ignore this. The nature is shouting at us, not only every time we see in the news fire burning the forests, or the day temperatures breaking the records, or one more hurricane for which we do not have a letter to name again. And again, and again.  We also hear the shouts of people, those who are victims of a genocide, of famine, wars, infrastructural injustice, those who burn out, depress, suicide, those who numb themselves enough to survive a world which is not serving life but something else. We need to listen and wake up. I can see it and I can feel it in their bodies too. We need to collectively wake up.

My work as a designer has been very much influenced by my corporeal experiences. I designed a collection of furniture for the inhabitants of Mexico City to remind and reconnect them with the sensations of nature: A table with a surface made of river stones; inspired in the Japanese zen gardens, a sand box with wooden balls in different sizes to get a self foot massage before going to bed. I designed an speculative spherical geodesic sleeping device, made of wood in warm tones –womblike–, to roll and turn infinitely feeling safe like we did in the womb before we were born.  

In 1991 my parents moved us from the Caribbean tropical jungle and emerging suburban reality of Cancun back to the densely inhabited and extraorbitantly polluted Mexico City. I was transferred from a Montessori-inspired Primary School housed under a palapa –a roof weaved with palm tree leaves– to a concrete built La Salle Catholic Bilingual School.  We were welcomed by the coldest winter in a decade, a pollution crisis with the highest index of IMECAS (Metropolitan Index of Air Quality) ever, which basically made the air potentially poisonous every morning. During a whole year, we were sent to school every morning with a face mask.

I am not sure what is what my body resented the most: the new greyness, the pollution, the winter temperature, or the fact that in a city that size, as a 9-year-old, I was not able to go on my own outside anymore, less to bike anywhere by myself. When I recall these experience and I look at my early design projects with that lens, I see how my projects were influenced by my own corporeal heimweh, a body nostalgia for the geographies I was not able to inhabit anymore.  

This insight is perhaps rooted in my own bodywork practice. I discovered Yoga at the age of seventeen and since then it has been part of my personal and professional life. I became an avid practitioner in my early twenties and a young new teacher by the age of twenty-three. Yoga has also led me to explore and study other bodywork techniques as well as psychosomatic approaches. Spending so much dedication to the intricacies of this somatic practice as well as doing psychotherapy and studying Transpersonal Psychology has given me the space to get to know well the territory of my inner world and its wires to outer realms. Somatic–a term with greek etymological roots–refers to the physical body. Thomas Hanna, one of the first somatic practitioners in the West offers the following definition:  

Somatics is the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception. When a human being is observed from the outside- i.e., from a third-person viewpoint-the phenomenon of a human body is perceived. But, when this same human being is observed from the first-person viewpoint of his own proprioceptive senses, a categorically different phenomenon is perceived: the human soma.

The two distinct viewpoints for observing a human being are built into the very nature of human observation which is equally capable of being internally self-aware as well as externally aware. The soma, being internally perceived, is categorically distinct from a body, not because the subject is different but because the mode of viewpoint is different: It is immediate proprioception -a sensory mode that provides unique data.

A Somatic practice therefore implies we approach the body as a vessel and a vehicle which we access through our own internal experience and viewpoint.  According to researcher Kelly Mullan 'Somatics is the name given to the field of western mind-body methods, encompassing ways of working with the body that are therapeutic, educational, artistic, and physically expressive’. Somatic practices in this sense can offer us a channel of self knowledge and expression. They can offer a field for us to unfold our own subjectivities, make the unconscious conscious, reconnect with parts of ourselves which remained dormant and integrate them. Somatic practices can also lead to healing processes both individually and collectively.

How is this integration relevant for Design practice? Somatic practices can offer us a portal to explore aspects of the creative process which are determinant in the making of of our practice and its outcomes, being it Design or other practices. If we engage in a process of questioning or reorientation of Design, a Somatic practice can be a powerful compassion seedbed of new directions.

In my own practice, the work of Audre Lorde and Suely Rolnik were key to understand the role of the body and its relevance in this process of reorientation of the creative process. When I first read the Audre Lorde essay and masterpiece, I felt a deep sense of resonance, I knew in my cells what she was writing about. In my own practice as a designer until recently, I felt mostly inserted in a male world and a sense of ambivalent conflict for having a practice which was deeply female oriented. It was always challenging to me to explain to others what it was that I was designing in those terms, or what was my practice about, specially with the above emotional charge. I was a member of Stellwerk Basel –a seedbed for start ups and new projects in the creative industries–between 2013 and 2019. When I submitted an application to get a space in the coworking floor, I got a positive answer paired with a request to focus on the creative work I could do not related to my bodywork, Yoga, Somatic practice and teaching only. I did try, while carrying both pride and shame for the body-oriented creative work I was doing on the side. I found extremely conflicting to answer questions about my practice. When I would ge the question, what is what you design? I would doubt as to what to answer and convey the scope of my work. I came across a piece of feminist literature which made me look at this body-related rejection through a different perspective. I considered myself a feminist, so this realisation put me into a tunnel of introspection. I realised my ambivalence regarding my own practice, was an internalised reenactment of the patriarchal systemic diminishment towards that which is related to the body. I saw how I internally was reproducing the same devaluation process, and so, I decided to change that. Fortunately this process coincide with a change in the Stellwerk team, a new manager which was neutral–even slightly supportive– towards the cross-pollination I was doing between creative worlds.  

Perhaps “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power” offers an important piece of insight to complement the puzzle I am trying to illuminate. In this essay Audre Lorde unveils that which has been obscured by Christian Theology and Patriarchy. I do not find better words myself but to add some quotes from her essay which perfectly convey the point:

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it believed within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us  becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Like many other somatic and bodywork practices, Yoga–specifically the practice of Asana or postural Yoga–aims to rewire with the body but ultimately to rewire with the cosmos. In this sense, rewiring with our own body, the first territory, is a step towards rewiring with the extended territory we inhabit. This process brings me to the work of Suely Rolnik–a brazilian art theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst.

In her theory work, she explains we hold two types of internal experiences: the Personal & the Trans or Extra-personal. The first one is formed by all those characteristics of my individual person: I am Daniela, a student of the MA in Experimental Design, I speak three languages, I love music and thrift stores. I am a Yoga practitioner and teacher, a Designer by profession. I am Mexican by brith and Swiss by becoming. All of what creates our sociocultural repertoire of responses. The latter refers to the experience we have as an alive being which belongs to an ecosystem.

She explains that we are constantly affected by the environment. It affects our vital force, orienting our desire or drive. This drive leads us to act by means of decoding the body-knowing information from the transpersonal experience, or react within the limits of the sociocultural repertoire. In her theory, since the end of the 15th century, the fabric of the Capitalist Patriarchal Colonial world has

separated our subjectivity from the transpersonal. This experience–according to Suely Rolnik–exists only in captivity. When we have no access to the pulsating stemming and germinating from our alive being, we are limited to only react with the sociocultural repertoire, which in itself reproduces the modes of existence of the Capitalist Patriarchal Colonial world. My own rejection towards my body-oriented creative practice is a phenomenal example of how we can limit our responses to a sociocultural repertoire, even when it is against our ownselves.

“In our living condition we are constituted by the effects of forces, with their diverse and mutable relationships that stir the vital flows of a world. These forces traverse all the bodies that compose the world, making them one sole body in continuous variation, whether or not we are conscious of it. We can designate these effects as affects. It is an experience that is extrapersonal (since there is no personal contour, since we are the variable effects of the forces of the world, which compose and recompose our bodies), extrasensory (since it

happens via affect, distinct from perception), and extra-sentimental (since it happens via vital emotion, distinct from psychological emotion). We usually call “intuition” the extra-cognitive mode of decoding that is proper to

affect’s power of assessment. However, this is a word so worn out in our culture –because of a neglect of what is not from the rational order proper to the subject—that I propose to replace it with “body-knowing” or “life-knowing,” an ecoethological knowing.

Unlike communication, the means of relating with the other in this sphere is empathy, in which there is no distinction between the cognizant subject and external object. In the subjective experience outside-the-subject, the other lives effectively in our body; it dwells in us through its effects, the affects. It is with its living presence that empathy takes place. By inhabiting our body, the forces of the world impregnate us, creating embryos of other worlds. These produce in us a sense of strangeness, distinct from the familiarity provided by our experience as subjects.”

Coming back to the example of my own body-oriented work rejection. If I would have rather followed only the information of my transpersonal experience, I would have simply affirmed and legitimised my body-oriented design work, since the collective need for care and spaces of healing were strongly there. However, in my personal experience a set of sociocultural settings were repeating patriarchal values which were overriding the above. Not only in me but in those around me, like the first Stellwerk manager, and others which considered that design should only circumscribe to its traditional disciplines.

How we reproduce these social repertoires at the individual and collective levels creates the world we live in. In simple examples as the above, we little by little build worlds which reaffirm certain values or which offer new ones. How design is made and oriented are affected by these social repertoires as well.

Coming back to the main theme of this chapter, somatic practices, a regular body connection practice can offer us a space to observe how we reproduce what and choose how we want to respond and to orient our practices. One of my yoga teachers use to refer to the practice of postural Yoga and meditation as to a practice of intimacy with reality. This chapter's opening words by Gloria Anzaldúa reverberate here too “ the writing (creative) process is the same mysterious process that we use to make the world”. The space of self intimacy we visit in somatic practices is fertile with insights about our own subjectivity and how it determines our world and future making.

“The subjective experiences of the subject (the personal) and of the outside-the-subject (the extrapersonal) therefore produce two totally different sensations: the familiar and the strange. These work simultaneously and inseparably, but according to distinct logics and temporalities. There is no possibility of synthesis or translation between them; their relationship is marked by an irreducible paradox that is unavoidable in principle. Attempting to germinate, the embryos of worlds trigger the movement of the drive, leading life to take shape in other forms of world that would result from their germination. These are not made in opposition to existing forms, but through the affirmation of a becoming that endangers their perpetuation. Destabilized by the paradoxical experience of strange-familiar, subjectivity experiences a tension between two movements. On the one hand, the movement that presses it toward the conservation of life in its essence as the power for germination, in order to be embodied in new modes of existence. On the other, the movement that presses it toward the conservation of existing modes in which life is temporarily embodied and subjectivity can recognize itself in its experience as a subject.”

Suely Rolnik refers to this world creation process in her work, her approach is complementary to that of Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa . She refers to this sphere of intimacy and subjectivity as the micropolitical:

“Micropolítica” es el nombre que Guattari dio en los años 60s a aquellos ámbitos que por considerarse relativos a la “vida privada” habían quedado excluidos de la acción reflexiva y militante en las políticas de izquierda tradicional: la sexualidad, la familia, los afectos, el cuidado, el cuerpo, lo íntimo. Todo eso a lo que después Foucault intentará apuntar con los términos “microfísica del poder” y, más tarde, “biopoder.” *

The micropolitical is therefore a field where collective transformation and change can be planted too, in strong relationship with to the macropolitical sphere. Suely Rolnik affirms–in a play of inverted relationship though–, there is no possibility of transformation in the government structures without a change in the micropolitical dispositives of subjectivity production. In this sense, the family, sexuality and the body are not simple institutions or corporeal realities, but libidinal frameworks made of affects and percepts beyond the scope of the individual consciousness. In the same way there is a macropolitical decolonial critique on extractivism of natural resources, She equates an extractivism of the body-knowing, the unconscious and our subjectivities, of what she refers to as the “pulse of life”, language, our desire or drive, the imagination and our affects. In this spirit, she offers the following suggestions to decolonize the subconscious:

10 Suggestions for Decolonizing the Subconscious

1. De-anesthetizing our vulnerability to the forces of the world in their variable diagrams; such vulnerability is the potency of subjectivity in its outside-of-the-subject experience;

1. Activating body-knowing: the experience of the world in its live condition, whose forces produce effects in our living condition;

1. Unblocking access to the tense and paradoxical experience of the strange-familiar;

1. Not denying the resulting fragility of destabilizing deterritorialization that the strange-familiar experience inevitably promotes;

1. Not interpreting the fragility and its malaise as a “bad thing” and not projecting on it phantasmatic readings (premature ejaculations of the ego provoked by its fear of abandonment and collapse and its imaginary consequences: repudiation, rejection, social exclusion, humiliation);

1. Not giving in to the will of conserving forms and to the pressure they exert against life’s will to power (potency) in its impulse towards differentiation. On the contrary, sustaining oneself on the tense line of this unstable state until the creating imagination succeeds in building a place of body-and-utterance, which, being the bearer of the strange-familiar’s pulsation, is capable of actualizing the virtual world announced by this experience, thus allowing the agonizing forms to die;

1. Not running over the creating imagination’s own temporality so that the process of germinating a world is not interrupted. Such an interruption would make the imagination vulnerable to letting itself be diverted towards its own expropriation by the pimping- capitalistic regime. In this expropriation, the creating imagination subjects itself to the imaginary that such a regime seductively imposes, thus becoming sterile;

1. Not renouncing desire in its ethics of life-affirmation, which implies keeping it fertile, flowing in its unlimited process of transfiguration and transvaluation;

1. Not negotiating the nonnegotiable: everything that would obstruct life-affirmation in its essence as a force of creation. Learning to distinguish the nonnegotiable from the negotiable: everything that could be accepted because it does not preclude the vital instituting force, but on the contrary creates the objective conditions for it to produce an event, fulfilling its ethical fate;

1. Practicing thinking in its full function: inextricably ethical, aesthetic, political, critical, and clinical. That is to say, reimagining the world in each gesture, each word, each relation, each mode of existence—whenever life requires so.

TOOLKIT FOR OTHER WORLDINGS: AN SPECULATIVE SPACE INSPIRED IN THE TEMAZCAL | SWEAT LODGE CEREMONY

The temazcal and sweat lodge practices are steam bath–like traditions. They are practiced widely since centuries in the territories known before as the Cem Anahuac, the land between waters– meaning between the Pacific, Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The territories known now as North and Central America. With a precolonial origin, these rituals are still practiced nowadays in a wide range of settings, from those conserved in remote communities and rural spaces as well as in big urban centres. The temazcal also has a wide range of architecture form those temporarily build with flexible branches and blankets, to fixed ones in clay, adobe and or stones.

The temazcal is a purification and detoxing practice, central to the healthcare of prehispanic societies in Mesoamerica. A ceremony which envisions healing practices not only for the physical body but with a holistic and communal approach. Typically, it has a round egg shape aligned with the cardinal points. It symbolises the womb of the earth, a dark and liminal space which we enter to rebirth: we offer parts of us to transmutate. In this darkness, we invite those parts to die so we can make space for the new to be born.

This Toolkit for Other Worldings proposes an speculative space inspired in the Temazcal ceremony. I envision it as rehearsal of a possible future, where health services embrace the needs of the physical body as much as the needs of the psychic body and soul. A holistic approach to health in which our inner worlds are welcome as much as it is a practice of communing and collective health.

This installation proposes to frame our local views on healing and communing, by waking up the body to a renewed capacity of feeling and by connecting with others in an environment where the body is central. The materials used to build it are an ecological poetic gesture. All materials are discarded from other worlds and repurposed for this project: a geo dome from an art exhibition in Crete, previously stored in Basel for 4 years. A pile of private yoga mats abandoned in the yoga studio, blankets from the secondhand shop, discarded and second hand sauna ovens.

CONCLUSIONS

My first thought here is that it was the right choice and worth to enrol in this MA Program. I discovered new knowledge, learned a lot, connected with like minded people. I achieved what I had envisioned: to hone my practice and to make sense of it while giving it a future perspective.

This research will become a project for further development. I see the sense of investing time, energy and experiments in it. A few months ago, I visited a good friend in Bern recovering from a burn out, while we sat over tea to update each other, I could feel how our beings began to wire. She shared with me how she was approaching her integration back in her workspace, with new limits and listening wisely to the signals of her body, meanwhile creating new emotional work climates with her closest colleagues. From this conversation, the idea of becoming or seeing oneself as possible generators of psychic and emotional microclimates evolved.

A microclimate is a local set of atmospheric conditions that differ from those in the surrounding areas, often slightly but sometimes substantially.

A microclimate can offer an opportunity as a small growing region for crops that cannot thrive in the broader area; this concept is often used in permaculture practiced in northern temperate climates. Microclimates can be used to the advantage of gardeners who carefully choose and position their plants.

Our analogy inspired me to look at my work as a beautiful geographical accident generating a creative microclimate, inserted in a work and social landscape dominated by a different weather, where other types of plants can thrive hopefully to contribute to transformational justice and social change, in the spirit of Adrienne Maree Brown. An author who deeply inspired me through this journey but didn’t directly quote in this document.

In this wandering, I stumbled upon an interview of Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I find perfect to close my thesis as she uses as well a microclimate analogy in a complementary take to mine, focused on how different knowledges can relate to each other. I include the interview below, with heartfelt gratitude for the dedication you had to read my words.

Kimmerer took the opportunity to clarify the concept of “knowledge sovereignty” with a metaphor involving the Three Sisters Garden: a planting technique that creates an ideal microclimate for growing corn, squash, and beans, named for a Ganondagan legend.

Q:  

Some have come to a determination of interpretation that “braiding knowledges” means fitting Indigenous knowledge into already existing systems. Is that what you intended? And even now, having maybe seen the concept evolve, where do you hope the idea of braiding knowledges goes in the future?

RWK:

I’m grateful to you for illuminating that question, because in my work and all of our work at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and the broader Indigenous Science Community, of which you and I are both a part, the model that we really try to use is of knowledge sovereignty. That Indigenous knowledge is intrinsically a sovereign way of knowing as is Western science. They’re very different assumptions about what knowledge means, where knowledge comes from. And so to me, when I think about the metaphor of the braid in Braiding Sweetgrass, it’s: How do we take these strands of knowledge to care for the Earth? But they are separate strands of knowledge. When they are braided together, the notion is of sovereign knowledges in conversation with each other.

The metaphor that I actually like to use the most and have written on a fair bit is this idea of planting a knowledge garden. I see here my friends from Ganondagan, so I’m going to think about a Three Sisters Garden, right? And you and I in the university, I feel like I’m trying to plant a knowledge garden. And for too long, Indigenous knowledge, if mentioned at all, was just sort of a sidebar. And what I really like to think about is, when we plant a Three Sisters Garden, we plant the corn first. We plant the elder knowledge first. And to me, that’s traditional knowledge. That’s where we should start. And then after that corn is well established and growing up, then we plant the bean. And to me, Western science is an analog to the bean. Very curious, very wandering all over, unconstrained by accountability for knowledge. That’s a fundamental tenet of Western science. That knowledge for knowledge sake, right? It’s not connected to responsibility.

But in a Three Sisters Garden, what happens? That bean is guided by the corn. And so both of them flourish. And so that’s how I like to think about it, is prioritizing the elder knowledge and providing an intellectual scaffolding of sorts for the tools of Western science to be used in a way that embody the values of respect, relationship, reciprocity, reference.

So the corn doesn’t become the bean. The beans don’t become the corn, but they’re more productive when they grow together. And then of course that leaves the squash, right? The squash in the garden, right? What is that squash doing? It’s creating a microclimate where those two species of plant or of knowledge could grow together. And since you and I are both in universities, as I imagine many of you are as well, I think that’s what education is for. Can we create education and research structures that create a microclimate where Indigenous knowledge can lead and Western science can be guided? So I am not talking about blending knowledges in any way, but having them grow together in complementarity the way that corn and beans do.

WALTER MIGNOLO

Then border thinking created the conditions to link border epistemology with immigrant consciousness and, consequently, delink from territorial and imperial epistemology grounded on theological (Renaissance) and ego-logical (Enlightenment) politics of knowledge. As is well known, theo- and ego-politics of knowledge was grounded in the suppression of sensing and the body and of its geo-historical location. It was precisely that suppression that made it possible for both theo- and ego-politics of knowledge to claim universality.

Dependency theorists and the New World group were colonial subjects, that is, subjects dwelling in the local histories and experiences of colonial histories. For Spanish and Portuguese in South America have the same grammar as in Spain or Portugal respectively, but they inhabit different bodies, sensibilities, memories and overall world-sensing. I use the expression world-sensing instead of world vision because the latter, restricted and privileged by Western epistemology, blocked the affects and the realms of the senses beyond the eyes.

They needed to delink and to think in the border they were inhabiting. Not borders of nation-states but borders of the modern/colonial world, epistemic and ontological borders.

We write with our bodies in the border; our senses have been trained by life to perceive the difference, to sense that we have been made anthropos, that we do not belong or belong partially to the sphere and the eyes that look at us as anthropos, as others. Border thinking is, in other words, the thinking of us the anthropos who do not aspire to become humanitas because it is the enunciation of the humanitas that made us anthropos. We delink from the humanitas, we become epistemically disobedient, and think and do decolonially, dwelling and thinking in the borders of local histories confronting global designs.

First of all, modernity is not an ontological unfolding of history but the hegemonic narrative of Western civilization. So, there is no need to be modern. Even better, it is urgent to delink from the dream that if you are not modern you are out of history.

Decoloniality requires epistemic disobedience, for border thinking is by definition thinking in exteriority, in the spaces and time that the self-narrative of modernity invented as its outside to legitimize its own logic of coloniality.

ARTURO ESCOBAR

By this I do not mean that the work of this group is just of interest to allegedly universal social and human sciences, but that that the group seeks to make a decisive intervention into the very discursivity of the modern sciences in order to craft another space for the production of knowledge  an other way of thinking, un paradigma otro, the very possibility of talking about ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise’. What this group suggests is that an other thought, an other knowledge (and another world, in the spirit of Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum), are indeed possible.

The modernity/coloniality group certainly finds inspiration in a number of sources, from European and North American critical theories of modernity and postmodernity to South Asian subaltern studies, Chicana feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and African philosophy; many of its members operate within a modified world systems perspective. Its main driving force, however, is a continued reflection on Latin American cultural and political reality, including the subaltern knowledge of exploited and oppressed social groups. If dependency theory, liberation theology, and participatory action research can be said to have been the most original contributions of Latin American critical thought in the twentieth century (with all the caveats that may apply to such originality), the MC research program emerges as heir to this tradition.

the MC program should be seen as an other way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives (Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism); it locates its own inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-eurocentric modes of thinking.

As most intra-modern discussion suggest, globalization entails the universalization and radicalization of modernity,

Is globalization the last stage of capitalist modernity, or the beginning of something new?

From a philosophical and sociological perspective, the root of the idea of an increasingly overpowering globalization lies in a view of modernity as essentially an European phenomenon.

Historically, modernity has identifiable temporal and spatial origins: seventeenth century northern Europe (especially France, Germany, England), around the processes of Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. These processes crystallized at the end of the eighteenth century (Foucault’s modern episteme) and became consolidated with the Industrial Revolution.

Sociologically, modernity is characterized by certain institutions, particularly the nation state, and by some basic features, such as self-reflexivity (the continuous feedback of expert knowledge back into society, transforming it); the dismembedding of social life from local context and its increasing determination by translocal forces; and space/time distantiation, or the separation of space and place, since relations between ‘absent others’ become more important than face to face interaction (Giddens 1990).

Culturally, modernity can be further characterized by the increasing rationalization of the life-world, accompanied by universalization and individuation. Modernity brings about an order on the basis of the constructs of reason, the individual, expert knowledge, and administrative mechanisms linked to the state. Order and reason are seen as the foundation for equality and freedom, and enabled by the language of rights.

Philosophically, one may see modernity in terms of the emergence of the notion of ‘Man’ as the foundation for all knowledge and order of the world, separate from the natural and the divine. Logical truth the foundation for a rational theory of the world as made up of knowable (and hence controllable) things and beings

Vattimo emphasizes the logic of development the belief in perpetual betterment and overcoming  as crucial to the philosophical foundations of the modern order.

On the critical side, the disembeddedness of modernity is seen to cause what Paul Virilio (1999) calls global delocalization, including the marginalization of place.

The cultural project of ordering the world according to rational principles from the perspective of a male eurocentric consciousness.

Modernity of course did not succeed in constituting a total reality, but enacted a totalizing project aimed at the purification of orders (separation between us and them, nature and culture), although inevitably only producing hybrids of these opposites along the way (thus Latour’s dictum that ‘we have never been modern’, 1993).

Globalization entails the radicalization and universalization of modernity.

The triumph of the modern lies precisely in its having become universal. This may be call ‘the Giddens effect’: from now own, it’s modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of times. Not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European history and culture.

No matter how variously qualified, a ‘global modernity’ is here to stay. Recent anthropological investigations of ‘modernity at large’ (Appadurai 1996) have shown modernity to be seen as de- territorialized, hybridized, contested, uneven, heterogenous, even multiple, or in terms of conversing with, engaging, playing with, or processing modernity;

Could it be, however, that the power of Eurocentered modernity  as a particular local history  lies in the fact that is has produced particular global designs in such a way that it has ‘subalternized’ other local histories and their corresponding designs?

The identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity, with the concomitant subalternization of the knowledge and cultures of these other groups; (5) a conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality  a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself, and that relies on ‘a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center’

A new spatial and temporal conception of modernity in terms of the foundational role of Spain and Portugal (the so-called first modernity initiated with the Conquest) and its continuation in Northern Europe with the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment (the second modernity, in Dussel’s terms); the second modernity does not replace the first, it overlaps with it, until the present; (c) a focus on the peripheralization of all other world regions by this ‘modern Europe’, with Latin America as the initial ‘other side’ of modernity (the dominated and concealed side); and (d) a re-reading of the ‘myth of modernity’, not in terms of a questioning of the emancipatory potential of modern reason, but of modernity’s ‘underside’, namely, the imputation of the superiority of European civilization, coupled with the assumption that Europe’s development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture, by force if necessary what Dussel terms ‘the developmentalist fallacy’

re-valuing of landmark experiences of decolonization, from the Tupac Amaru rebellion and the 1804 Haitian revolution to the 1960s anti- colonial movements, as sources of visions for the future, as opposed to the conventional sources such as the French and American revolutions; and, in general, the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through from the political praxis of subaltern groups.

the proper analytical unit for the analysis of modernity is modernity/coloniality  in sum, there is no modernity without coloniality, with the latter being constitutive of the former (in Asia, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean).

the modern colonial world system as the ensemble of processes and social formations that encompass modern colonialism and colonial modernities

Coloniality of power (Quijano), a global hegemonic model of power in place since the Conquest that articulates race and labor, space and peoples, according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples. Colonial difference and global coloniality (Mignolo) which refer to the knowledge and cultural dimensions of the subalternization processes effected by the coloniality of power;

Coloniality of being (more recently suggested by Nelson Maldonado- Torres in group discussions) as the ontological dimension of colonialty, on both sides of the encounter;

Eurocentrism, as the knowledge model that represents the local European historical experience and which became globally hegemonic since the seventeenth century

notion of exteriority and transmodernity and Mignolo’s concept of border thinking, pluritopic hermeneutics, and pluriversality.

This notion of exteriority arises chiefly by thinking about the Other from the ethical and epistemological perspective of a liberation philosophy framework: the Other as oppressed, as woman, as racially marked, as excluded, as poor, as nature.

Both Mignolo and Dussel see here a strict limit to deconstruction and to the various eurocentered critiques of eurocentrism  in short, these continue to be thought about from within eurocentric categories (of, say, liberalism, Marxism, poststructuralism), not from the border thinking enabled by the colonial difference. . . . Critiques of modernity, in short, are blind to the (epistemic and cultural) colonial difference that becomes the focus of modernity/coloniality.

Dussel’s notion of transmodernity signals the possibility of a non-eurocentric and critical dialogue with alterity, one that fully enables ‘the negation of the negation’ to which the subaltern others have been subjected, and one that does not see critical discourse as intrinsically European. Integral to this effort is the rescuing of non-hegemonic and silenced counter-discourses, of the alterity that is constitutive of modernity itself.

Trans-modernity is a future-oriented project that seeks the liberation of all humanity … ‘in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual fertilization’

trans-modernity cannot be brought about from within modernity, but requires of the action  and the incorporative solidarity  of the subalternized groups, the objects of modernity’s constitutive violence embedded in, among other features, the developmentalist fallacy. Rather than the rational project of a discursive ethics, transmodernity becomes the expression of an ethics of liberation.

Resituating Anzaldu ́a’s metaphor of the border into the domain of coloniality, Mignolo adumbrates the possibility of ‘‘thinking otherwise’, from the interior exteriority of the border.

Finally, while Mignolo acknowledges the continued importance of the monotopic critique of modernity by Western critical discourse (critique from a single, unified space), he suggests that this has to be put into dialogue with the critique(s) arising from the colonial difference, which constitutes border thinking. The result is a ‘pluritopic hermeneutics’

a possibility of thinking from different spaces which finally breaks away from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective. This is the double critique of modernity from the perspective of coloniality, from the exterior of the modern/colonial world system. Let it be clear, however, that border thinking entails both ‘displacement and departure’ (2000, p. 308), double critique and positive affirmation of an alternative ordering of the real.

Border thinking points towards a different kind of hegemony, a multiple one. As a universal project, diversity allows us to imagine alternatives to universalism (we could say that the alternative to universalism in this view is not particularism but multiplicity). ‘The ‘West and the rest’ in Huntington’s phrase provides the model to overcome, as the ‘rest’ becomes the sites where border thinking emerges in its diversity, where ‘mundializacio ́n’ creates new local histories remaking and readapting Western global designs . . . and transforming local (European) histories from where such designs emerged . . . . ‘Interdependence’ may be the word that summarizes the break away from the idea of totality and brings about the idea of networks whose articulation will require epistemological principles I called in this book ‘border thinking’ and ‘border gnosis’, as a rearticulation of the colonial difference: ‘diversality as a universal project’, which means that people and communities have the right to be different precisely because ‘we’ are all equals’

This project has to do with the rearticulation of global designs by and from local histories; with the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culture  such as in the Zapatista project, that remaps Marxism, thirdworldism, and indigenism, without being either of them, in an excellent example of border thinking.

The MC perspective moves away from viewing ‘Latin America’ as an object of study (in relation to which US-based Latin American Studies would be the ‘knowing subject’), towards an understanding of Latin America as a geo-historical location with and within a distinct critical genealogy of thought. Modernity/Coloniality suggests that globalization must be understood from a geo-historical and critical Latin American perspective. With this the MC approach proposes an alternative to the genealogy of the modern social sciences that are still the foundation of Latin American Studies in the US. In this way, Latin American Studies in, say, North America and Europe, and Critical Social Thought in Latin America (which offers the epistemic grounding for the MC group) emerge as two complementary but distinct paradigms.8 This also means that, as an epistemic perspective, the MC research program is not associated with particular nationalities or geographical locations. To occupy the locus of enunciation crafted by the MC project, in other words, one does not need to be a Latin American nor live in the continent. ‘Latin America’ itself becomes a perspective that can be practiced from many spaces, if it is done from counter-hegemonic perspectives that challenge the very assumption of Latin America as fully constituted object of study, previous to, and outside of, the often imperialistic discourses that construct it.

It is transdisciplinary to the extent that disciplinary inquiries are set into dialogue with those of other fields, sometimes by the same author, leading to new forms of inquiry.

Latin America be understood more as a ‘perspective’ or epistemic space than as a region. It is an approach that, again, while it can be said to have roots in the Latin American experience, finds sustenance globally.

The group can be said to be a community of argumentation that works

collectively on concepts and strategies; up to a certain point, it can be said to practice the critical border thinking it proposes; hence the emphasis on questions of knowledge. In other words, there is an explicit collective dimension to the conceptual work that, although around a set of formative concepts, is significantly open ended. This sense of collectivity is strengthened by the feeling of the radical potential of the project  the fact that what is at stake is ‘not only to change the content but the very terms of the conversation’ (Mignolo). The goal is to craft new forms of analysis, not to contribute to already established (eurocentric) systems of thought, no matter how critical these might be.