Reactivating Exiled Capacities (REC) is an art-based inquiry into listening with more honesty, sensing what has been fragmented but not erased, and making space for its potential return. It is not meant to be a comfortable path, but one that requires us to sit with what we don’t want to know about ourselves: the ways we have been trained to numb and to invest in our own disconnection.
Rooted in the pedagogical framework of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective, this inquiry follows the invitation to engage with colonialism not as a past event, but as an ongoing entanglement that shapes our embodied ways of relating, feeling, and knowing. At the heart of the inquiry, we asked:
- What possibilities open through artistic practices as a modality of experiential knowing, relational sensing, and repatterning perception?
- What invitations emerge when we relate through—and with—art as a living practice?
- What becomes possible when artistic practices move outside answers or arguments, and instead engage with dissonance, play, rupture, grief, and metaphor?
REC is an invitation to practice capacities for relationality that have been exiled from the psycho-affective body, the nervous system, the collective onto-epistemic field, and the socio-political structures we are embedded in. It asks: How are we relying on relational debts we choose to ignore—harm displaced onto other bodies, other lands, and other times—and how might we reckon with this with maturity? To reactivate the capacity to sit with this question is not to return to an idealized past, but to engage more honestly with the present, in order to move toward repair and different futures.
Reactivating exiled capacities requires practices that extend beyond intellectual comprehension. We invite a form of knowing that is not just cognitive, but meta-epistemic—one that recognizes partiality, contradiction, and the limits of human understanding. This means holding space for multiple truths, even when they appear contradictory, and listening beyond words. It means recognizing that sensory, embodied, and ancestral knowledge are not in opposition to scientific or conceptual frameworks, but in conversation with them.
How are we relying on relational debts we choose to ignore—harm displaced onto other bodies, other lands, and other times—and how might we reckon with this with maturity?
In a sense, reactivating these exiled capacities is like tending to a relationship over time: it deepens and gains nuance as we come into relation with them. Most of these capacities live in the embodied layers of our existence—in how we respond to complexity, and in how we care for the entangled web of life we are part of. REC is one attempt among many to support this reactivation—a humble contribution to a larger field of efforts seeking to interrupt the patterns of separability that sustain harm.
About the REC Residency
This inquiry emerged through the weaving hands of Azul Carolina Duque, a Colombian artist whose practice moves between music, clowning, and grief work—nurturing spaces where relational capacities might reawaken.
In 2024, a digital art residency was hosted with several artists from diverse artistic practices, geographical locations, and ancestral heritages. It was a shared space to reactivate capacities that have been exiled through colonial modernity: sensibilities for relationality, care, accountability, and complexity.
To enter this inquiry, each artist first participated in the Facing Human Wrongs course, which invited them to confront their complicity in systems of harm, to feel the grief and contradictions that arise, and to sit with discomfort without rushing to solutions.
From this ground, the artists created artistic, somatic, and metaphorical invitations—experiments designed to nurture relational sensibilities and cultivate the capacity to stay with complexity. These invitations offer ways to interrupt conditioned desires for comfort, certainty, and control, and to reawaken the embodied wisdom that colonial modernity has tried to sever.
REC’s Relationship to Art and Language: An Aesthetics of Listening
The invitations that emerged from this residency are not performances or artworks in the traditional sense, because REC approaches art not as object, vehicle for content, or product—but as an ecology of living practices.
These practices engage with art not in the service of representation, but as invitation: to feel, to unlearn, to stay with what resists resolution. Artistic practice becomes a relational technology for tuning perception, disrupting conditioned habits of attention, and composting the logics of control, purity, and separability that underlie colonial modernity.
This approach has profound implications for how we relate to language.
Since the reactivation of exiled capacities is not an informational problem, language is not used here as a carrier of fixed concepts. Within REC, language becomes a proxy for sensibilities—a vibrational field rather than a tool of transmission.
As you move through this text, you will encounter different proxy-languages—words that attempt to approximate the vibrational field we seek to nurture. Yet it is crucial to release the expectation that these proxy-languages serve as encyclopedic agents. These words are not definitions: they are suggestions, approximations, pointers, and guides.
This reframing of art and language is an aesthetics of listening—not listening for answers, but listening with frequencies.
We invite those who engage with these invitations to approach them as they would a piece of music, or a shift in temperature. Let it move you, stretch you, blur your boundaries. Let meaning hover at the edges of sensation.
Header photograph by Kyra Royo Fay
Singing With Elemental Forces
Reactivating relational capacities through eco-somatic voice and listening
we are mystery and matter in motion
This set of exercises is an invitation to dance with the unknown; with the mystery inside you, and between you and everything.
listening to the liminal
Learning to listen to ourselves, land, and spaces in between.
Telluric Dreaming
Through the experience of dreaming, we come closer to the planetary metabolism, connecting with an ongoing flow of mutation that allows us to feel and participate in the shapeshifting of existence…
Composting addictions and the art of being woven
Sustaining life by surrendering resistance
