Creative Activism for Kincentric Justice

Session1: Orientation, Introductions

We co-create the learning community and begin by introducing each other to ourselves with an environmental autobiography. What land and bodies of water did we feel connected with in childhood? Where do we currently live and what is our relationship with more-than-human beings or nonhuman kin? We explore kincentric worldviews using excerpts of texts by Enrique Salmon, Sherri Mitchell, Zoe Todd, and Max Liboiron as prompts for poetic or arts-based, embodied response and exploration.

Session 2: Diagnosis: Undoing Justice and Kincentric Worldviews

This week we diagnose the systemic toxicities in which we live and breathe—the carceral state, coloniality, capitalism. We begin to imagine how to disrupt, decolonize, and liberate ourselves from those systems. We explore “strategic questioning” and craft questions that will guide our projects. How do we step back from the context we’re embroiled in to get a different view of the systems that bind us? Can we disrupt how the systems are codified and enforced? We listen to and experience artists who dance with justice and law in different ways: for example, Nadia Myre, Talking Rivers, Vivien Sansour, Rebecca Belmore, Cannupa Hanska, Marie Watt, Post Commodity and Raven Chacon, and others. The work of these artists will prompt our own arts-based exploration.

Session 3: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Vanessa Andreotti

We engage with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective and the Global Citizenship Education Otherwise booklet. We practice sketching and gesture towards a project plan for experiments leading to a project. Make quick sketches, experiment slowly. Write fast, revise slowly. How do the GTDF compass questions land with you? What are your compass questions?

Session 4: Decentering Humans: Human Rights, Ecocide and Earth Jurisprudence

This week we will recite excerpts from legal documents—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and ecocide laws. Each of us will choose a method of responding to, integrating, disrupting and/or transforming the legal documents through arts-based methodologies. We will also review Indigenous law documents. We encourage each other to dive in and make an artwork, poem, performance and test it in on the streets, in the field or neighboring forest.

Session 5: Center for Artistic Activism (C4AADesign ), Halpring’s RSVP Cycle, Method & Evaluation

We share our project sketches, plans, ideation, engage the iterative process of emergent artmaking. What are the methods of evaluation most appropriate for your project? We review scaffoldings for artistic process developed by the Center for Artistic Activism, AEffect project planning, Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycle, and revisit GTDF experiments.

Session 6: Kincentric Practice

This week we spiral down into a kincentric worldview, bringing our attention to a nonhuman being. We recite ecocide laws and Rights of Nature laws, this time practicing attunement to a nonhuman being. It could be water, air, wind, river, mountain, four-legged and furred, fungi or winged being. Consider each of our projects from the perspective of these beings.

Session 7: Evaluate, Iterate

By this week, each of us has created some act or work of creative activism. A poem, a gesture, a song, a dance. You’ve witnessed the emergence of this butterfly and releasedit into the world. What happened? How did it work? What would you change next time?

Session 8: Celebrate and Co-create

For our final session, we share our projects and celebrate our journeys. We sense whether future collaborations might emerge, other worlds might comingle and co-become.