Online | Workshops

Composting the Shit with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti

This series of sequenced workshops looks at the spell of separability cast by modernity that bifurcates people and the rest of nature. Informed by this bifurcation, the harm caused by modernity’s promise of progress-at-no-cost is brought to the fore in Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Alongside Vanessa, we begin to declutter the mess of modernity, revealing myriad complicities while gaining tools to help rearrange ourselves in relation to modernity’s dying structures and systems.

It is in this rearranging that “hospicing” becomes possible. Through hospice, modernity is put into palliative care and then, finally, to rest. We, as characters in modernity’s story, are guided through a process of transformation and into a new way of being in relation. Or, as Vanessa calls it, we begin composting the shit:

We talk in the book about how to compost our shit—both literally and metaphorically. How to stay with what’s difficult and painful without relationships falling apart, without feeling overwhelmed and immobilized, and without demanding a quick fix, or to be rescued from the discomfort… [1]

In this series of workshops, Vanessa will speak about staying with the mess, wading through the clutter, and the paradoxes and contradictions that make themselves comfortable within it, opening up space to learn from what is dying.

WORKSHOP REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED.

Oliveira Andreotti and Lucia Pietroiusti, Vanessa, and Lucia Pietroiusti. “Hospicing Modernity: A Conversation.” e-flux Journal #139, October 2023.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. She is also one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and the co-curator of Art-Life Rituals for Radical Tenderness with performance artist Dani d'Emilia. Vanessa is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Education of the University of Victoria.

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all.

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us.

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.