What if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? What if we considered that this may well result from both ecological and social devastations as well as radical propositions and programs for another world, a better world, whatever that may look like? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come? How to imagine it collaboratively?

Denise Ferreria da Silva

Arika conceive of Episodes as ongoing, deconstructed festivals: iterative social aesthetic spaces of study. Attending to what’s going on now, present Episodes are informed by past ones, in roundabout, non-linear ways. Recent ones have looked through the lens of abolition—of prisons, police, of current regimes of power—to reaffirm our connections to the life-affirming, contingent, intertwined and inseparable sociality that should instead endure.

Each Episode finds spaces of overlap between the shared concerns of lots of the different networks Arika are involved with. These develop narratively over time as a set of evolving themes. Those themes doesn’t describe every aspect of all of the artists, thinkers or organisers practices at the Episode. But it’s maybe a space from which we can start generative conversations. Given what is happening in Gaza—and Sudan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Amazon and elsewhere—Episode 11 will directly relate past enquiries to the violence of contemporary settler colonialism, and the Eurocentric fictions that legitimate it: the possessive individual, whiteness, property and the state; and on practices of worlding and of knowing the world otherwise, that persist, resist and endure under the duress of colonial violence.

Imperialism and ongoing colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence, and Indigenous and Black peoples have been building worlds and then rebuilding worlds for as long as we have been in existence. Relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss. Building worlds and living in them anyway.

Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ¹

For the last 400 years, one way of imagining existence has dominant the world. Robyn Maynard has called this fiction a death-drive-come-worldview. Geni Núñez calls is a monoculture of thought, and part of what Ailton Krenak thinks of as specifically white repertoire. It is a way of knowing the world extruded out of the practices of power—the colonial and racial violence of European global extraction—to retrospectively legitimate them. This false universalism rests a specific idea of human existence, as summarised by John Locke—dragged by Ligia Lewis in her film; A Plot, A Scandal—who set out Man’s ‘natural rights’ to life, liberty and property: ownership of himself, his body, his status as human, and his right to own and extract from anything he deems less-than-human.

Every geo-political conflict is a function of the brutalities of ontological thinking.

Fred Moten ²

There is nothing natural in Locke’s propositions. They are expedient fictions invented to fulfill the needs of what would soon become Europe’s bourgeois class. They underpin the logic that allowed capitalism to metastasize across the globe through extractive, expropriative, genocidal practices grounded in total violence and state mediated killing—by law, surveillance, debt, medicine, enslavement, science, dispossession, pollution, language, war, disease, or simply by a signature on a page.

Humanism is one of the centrepieces of your immune system. “An organism’s immune system is a biological system consisting of an organized set of recognition and defence mechanisms, which distinguish between the ‘self’ from the ‘non-self’…What is identified as a ‘non-self’ molecule is destroyed”…Attacked on all sides, provoking hatred all over the world, cornered into justifying your conquests, weakened by the multi-faceted resistance movements and especially by the struggles for independence…you have had to equip yourselves with an apparatus for global and structural defence that would ensure the continuation of the imperial project as well as the longevity and survival of your social body. This political-ideological apparatus is the white immune system. Through it, many antibodies have been secreted. Among them, humanism and the monopoly of ethics.

Houria Bouteldja ³

Liberal discourse often assumes that the best way to fight oppression is by appealing to a universal and basic human status. We have learned through previous Episodes and from friends involved in the continuation of the Black Radical Tradition—Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Denise Ferreira da Silva— to be much more suspicious of this claim to personhood; that this enclosure of the self is a kind of derangement at the heart of Western liberalism. What if in fact, the logic of the possessive individual—as a form of solitary confinement within a body you own, and which can own others—is a colonial logic? What if this biological logic is the way by which Europeans and their allies separate immanent sociality into manageable property owners, and then into nation states—the imposition of carceral sets of pluralized singularities who own their lands.

This sanitary and hygienic ‘human’ figure is a poor institution manufactured by a civilisation without imagination.

Ailton Krenak ⁴

As Aileen Moreton Robinson ⁵ shows, ‘whiteness’ is first conceived as property: possession was defined to include only the cultural practices of whites. Community’s reciprocal inter-relational existence with the land is broken by coercing people to think of themselves as property owning individuals, not as emerging from a shared sociality. This aspect of colonisation can be seen in globally, in the Scottish Highlands, in Canada, Brazil or Australia. In America the Dawes Act named it as the ‘imposition of severalty’. But these sites of dispossession are not all the same. As Colin G. Calloway ⁶ or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ⁷ show, when the Highland Scots were cleared from their land, they were dispossessed into whiteness in the Americas. The Indigenous communities those Scots then colonised—part of gaining their status as white—were dispossessed into what the Eurocentric worldview considers nothingness and abjection.

The colonisation of Palestine was and is still necessitated by capitalist, imperialist and fascist interests and considerations. But the struggle in Palestine is not a reactionary one, it does not seek its own fascism, rather the freedom struggle in Palestine is an anti-capitalist struggle, and as thus it is not a struggle for a nation state, Palestine cannot be a nation state, Israel is, Palestine is the liberation of the world from nation states, from capitalism, even when capitalism has deceived itself into believing that it won the world decades ago. The Palestinians in their fight for Palestine resist uprootedness, they fight for a land, a right and a life, and these exceed the nation state.

Amirah Silmi ⁸

As Elizabeth Povinelli sets out, the cunning of late liberalism ⁹ , in the face of anti-colonial insurgency, was to convince oppressed peoples that rather than self-determination, what they really wanted was to feel included in the state, to be represented within it. By granting the right to think of yourself as a property owning individual, the state is merely sharing some of its mastery with you, as a form of colonial power. By representing and including you, it is reinforcing the colonial power of the individual as settler. Ariella Azoulay ¹⁰ , reframes this inclusion as a burdenous, predatory ‘incorporative exclusion’: the granting of certain courtesies and protections, always at a cost and contingent.

One of the costs of this inclusion is the requirement to participate in the denial of the violence this system of power rests upon. For possessive individuals and nation states to persist, for the colonial world not to end, many other worlds continue to be obliterated. This ongoing ending of worlds is the basis of coloniality: a conception of existence that requires entire communities to die in order for others to live and prosper. And from a certain perspective, while it may be the attempt to end others worlds, to the coloniser, it’s not the end of anything: it is just the everyday continuation of the dominant world project; as banal as ‘mowing the lawn’.

Genocide does not take place without denial. In fact, denial precedes genocidal violence, fuels it and is what insures, what gives genocide a future…Denial is not simply saying no, something isn’t happening. This is its baseline variant. Denial is what structures our sense of helplessness against what is happening. Denial names all the mechanisms for remaining complicit in the ongoing genocide and in constructing, participating in the building, expanding of the settlements, the ongoing genocidal-denialist futurity.

Anti-Denialist Coalition ¹¹

But: other ways of knowing the world—of worlding—exist.

While we want to study and animate practices that exhaust colonialism, individuation and the nation state, we also want to learn from and be involved in the ongoing refreshment and rediscovery of multiple collective, insurgent practices of contingent, intertwined life-giving worlding.

…through the dance of affective alliances, which involves me and a constellation of people and beings through which I disappear: I no longer need to be a political entity.

Ailton Krenak ¹²

At Episode 10, Fernando Zalamea, spoke about the mathematics of sheaves and topoi as metaphorical tools that can help us integrate multiple perspectives. Beyond the atomization of our world, beyond the imposition of diversity, such tools can aid the fight against the monological, as we try to enact the plurilogical in our lives.

Episode 11 tries to bring together such different worldviews, perspectives, and ways of knowing the world: be they abolitionist, Marxist, Communist, Anarchist, from the Black Radical Tradition; from Caribbean radical insurgency; from Indigenous struggle; or Arab, Levantine, North African movements for self-determination and anti-colonial organising; Korean shamanism; or alternative Aymaran practices of space-time. The Episode hopes to create multiple sites of transition between these perspectives: a back and forth, that allows some kind of synthesis, sustenance or replenishment of our commitments to ending the world as we know it.

…the concept of affective alliances, presupposes an affective bond between worlds that are not equal. This conception does not demand equality; on the contrary, it recognizes an intrinsic otherness in each person, in each being. It introduces a kind of radical inequality that forces us to pause.

Ailton Krenak ¹³

At previous Episodes we have approached some of these other ways of knowing the world through what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls practicing difference without separability. Or what Cedric Robinson might understand as something more than being a person, where we are all equally incomplete.

Episode 11 is an opportunity to ask Leanne Betasamosake Simpson what they are getting at when they say “I am not a Nation State”. What is the We of revolutionary love Houria Bouteldja writes of? How do Karrabing understand being ‘separate-separate and connected’ against an idea of property, ownership, or individuation? How does that chime with the kind of plural protagonists of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Oriana, in their refusal of the traditional distinctions between life and non-life? What do those have in common with the affective alliances Ailton Krenak speaks of: the need to no longer be a citizen, but to just be in flux, to enter the poetic site of affective life; continually making bonds, alliances and meanings as a form of worlding, open to experiencing other worlds, cosmovisions and pluriverses.

We have often used the metaphor of entanglement to understand ways of being otherwise. Elizabeth Povinelli writes about how such ideas are only of use if they recognise the asymmetric distribution of power to affect entanglement that still exists under capitalism; how entanglement is only useful if it contributes to ways of being otherwise to endure. Maybe we can talk about that.

How do Emilia Beatriz or Ligia Lewis engage with practices of grief, revenge, repair or rest contribute to our struggles? How do artists embody anti-colonial worldviews without them being extracting from, or representing them back to the white European gaze? Can we remain aware of ourselves in this at the Episode? How do aesthetic practices mirror or enact social and political concerns; whether Rashad Becker’s sonic fictions, or Chuquimamani-Condori’s compositional approaches that put into practice the comingling that happens in the Aymaran space-time of taypi?

And how—with Karrabing, Ailton Krenak and others—do we unpick European notions of linear time, to understand how the catastrophe we are facing is not one that looms over the horizon, but one that has already been happening for hundreds of years, one that is ancestral? In the face of such ancestral catastrophes, what does it mean for the world to turn its back on us?

Hopefully these and other concerns will emerge over the course of our time together.

A final quote:

The shift away from a politics of recognition would even include our having to abandon what has become the near sacred normative core of our theorisations of a just relationship with the Canadian state. This so-called nation to nation model, built on a framework of mutuality and equality between peoples. Here the 17th Century Haudenosaunee two row wampum treaty with the Dutch often stands in as a paradigmatic model of this normative relationship. Depicting two vessels, a ship and an Indian canoe travelling down a river in parallel and in autonomy with each other, and with each boat never attempting to steer or control the destiny of the other. The problem with these notions of nation to nation frameworks when applied to the contemporary power relations we face today, not power relations that represented 17th Century settler-indigenous relations, is that they assume a moral equivalency between the coloniser and the colonised that does not exist. They also assume the legitimacy of a ship of state’s economic, legal and political institutions, institutions that have all but destroyed the river and the river banks that we are supposed to be peacefully navigating together, with respect and harmony. Under such conditions, recognising the legitimacy of the colonial ship of states right of travel is an impossibility, one that we need to abandon. As such we need to start orienting our struggles towards a different end. Decolonisation, as I have now come to understand it, demands that we sink that fucking ship.

Glen Coulthard ¹⁴