Essay 4: On Joy, Gratefulness, and Transformation

This conversation between Rolando Vázquez and Rosa te Velde took place in response to an invitation by the Editorial Board to reflect on epistemic shifts in art education.

Rolando Vázquez is a decolonial thinker, sociologist, and educator. Rolando coordinates the María Lugones Decolonial Summer School,[1] which is now in its fourteenth year. Rosa and Rolando met in 2017 when Rosa participated in the Summer School, after which she worked with Rolando on his book Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (Mondriaan Fonds, 2020) as an editor. Rosa is a designer, teacher, and researcher and is currently working at the Amsterdam University of the Arts together with Dr Aminata Cairo, who is also part of the Decolonial Summer School faculty.

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Rosa: Rolando, I wanted to catch up with you and share with you what I’ve been working on, especially recently together with Aminata Cairo. As you know, we started the Social Justice and Diversity in the Arts lectorate at the Amsterdam University of the Arts last August.[2] This title was decided upon before we came and what was so interesting for us was that when we arrived, we noticed that people were using the terms inclusion, diversity, equity, etc, but not ‘social justice’. What does that tell us? Are the old terms worn out? Thinking about ‘social justice’ as the core framework for our lectorate, for us the question arose: can you ever do diversity and inclusion work without thinking about social justice? The answer seems to be yes: we often see that ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are welcomed, until things get uncomfortable.

I also feel there’s a certain approach to 'inclusivity', that now gets crystallised in some of our institutions, which doesn’t take into consideration the long histories of how we got here and where we want to be, and how we want to spend our energy in the bigger scheme of things. For example, to have a discussion during a board meeting about the word ‘craftmanship’ in some policy document is a convenient distraction. I want to think about how we dwell in the messy complexity of attempting to work on healing and restoring from the (historical) injustices that are distributed unequally among us, but that we’re all part of? What principles can guide us in doing the everyday work of ‘social justice’? For us they are: relationality, temporality, transformation, cost, and joy.

These five pillars are rooted in indigenous knowledge and decoloniality. For us, it’s a way of questioning and opening up the possibility of relating differently to each other, to our locality, to Earth, to our conditions, to histories and futures. Currently, there is a huge interest in ‘renewing discourses’ through a turn to indigenous knowledge as something ‘pure’, as separated from ‘us’, as consumable. There are many bad examples around—my friend Rana Ghavami brought up the example of Lo-TEK by designer Julia Watson, where indigenous knowledge is ‘mapped’ and then made graspable for designers. Our approach is based on understanding our own agency and responsibility and the possibility of living a life that is restorative, that aims at not reproducing the violences of modernity/coloniality while at the same time acknowledging our ongoing implicatedness.

Aminata was very persistent about the last pillar; joy. Perhaps it’s the most important pillar as well as the most difficult one, at least for me. It’s been interesting to notice that many white people are relieved that it’s there—even if they misunderstand or underestimate it! Aminata and I have had lots of conversations about this pillar. Like many others, anger has often been my fuel, but anger alone cannot keep us going. Anger is also related to positionality; who can afford to be angry, and when? What are the consequences and for whom? What we see in our schools is that a lot of young people are struggling: they are not guided well, and they don’t receive the tools to move forward; to constructively deal with situations, with each other, and with our institutions. Instagram doesn’t educate for that. People become lonely, disillusioned, they withdraw, they burn out. And the pandemic has weakened our capacities for being with each other. Aminata stresses that it’s so important to think about what we are grateful for. What keeps us going? What is worth fighting for? How do we spend our precious time and energy? Thinking about our short lives, this makes so much sense, but practising this on a daily basis is a challenge. It relates very much to temporality and relationality. What are your thoughts on joy?

Rolando: Joy is fundamental. The possibility of joy exists only in relation to others. There is no joy without relationality. You can be successful and 'happy', but you can never be joyful on your own. Joy is already marking that way of being in the world that is beyond the self; where for the self to have a fulfilling life, it needs to be in relation with others. And that is the danger of ‘identity politics’: the logic of identity tends to enclose us in the single self. I think that summarises how the project of Humanity of the west has been miscarried and ended up producing this single self that is deprived of relationality, and hence also deprived of the possibility of joy.

Joy is intimately connected to the gratefulness you mention. One of our students (from the Going Glocal programme of University College Roosevelt), who went to Mexico to be in Yucatan with the Maya collective Sumil Moóktáan, wrote a paper reflecting on gratefulness as a main value that she learned with them. She said that even though her mom and her family have always taught her to say thank you, she didn’t know what gratefulness really was. I think, in this deep sense, gratefulness is more than politeness and respect; it has to do with the capacity to receive the world of others, as something that is not a given, in a way, as grace. Something that is beyond our will of obtaining something, of acquiring, of accumulating, of appropriating. Gratefulness is the reverse of consumption. Gratefulness comes from that act of receiving things and relations and experiences that are beyond our own will to have. It doesn’t belong to the logic of property and appropriation, it belongs to the logic of relationality, that is a very deep consciousness that we are insufficient in ourselves, as single selves, and that our life will only have plenitude or grace when we go beyond ourselves and actively relate with others.

Rosa, could you speak about the pillar of transformation?

Rosa: We came to transformation because of how we’ve come to understand information. There have been many reports written recently on the colonial past. Cities, banks, the royal family all have their colonial past examined. This generates a lot of information—there are a lot of ‘facts’ available—yet what does it do? Aminata always says that ‘information does not equal transformation’. Transformation is not just an intellectual endeavour: our ‘cultural archive’ literally sits inside our bodies. The question is: when and how does transformation manifest? One way is in storytelling, as discussed by artist and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in ‘Land as Pedagogy’ (that Ayesha Ghanchi introduced to us during one of our Hear! Here! sessions at Rietveld/Sandberg, that you were also part of).[3] She talks about storytelling and how it can affirm ‘an ancient code of ethics’, built from hundreds of years of evolving wisdom. Every time you tell a story, there’s something else, something new, that sticks, or you read something else into it, or something more becomes meaningful. This for me relates to the pillar of transformation, and this text by Leanne Simpson in itself does this for me; each time I read it with students, we relate to it in different ways. So we are interested in when and how transformation manifests. Where in the body? How does it manifest collectively in the way we act, and how is transformation different from information? We can relate this to what you said earlier; like consumption, information is also a one-way logic, and quite literally so if it’s a report on the past. For us, transformation is very much related to relationality, temporality, and again to joy.

Rolando: ‘Information is not transformation’—this resonates with several things: one is what we[4] have been calling the difference between the logic of enunciation and the logic of reception. Information belongs to the mode of enunciation. It is just enunciating, and it is not concerned with transformation in the sense of embodying a different way of being in the world, a different aesthesis, and a different consciousness. Information about the colonial past remains insufficient if it doesn’t lead to transformation. Indeed, storytelling carries many of these tools that are necessary for going beyond information, because storytelling, unlike academic texts, is about the vernacular transmission of experience. It gives priority to the voice, so it is from the very start an experience of a body, an embodied experience, transmitted through the voice, through a coming to voice, and that is only voiced because it is received by another body. And when we receive the experience of others through the voice, if we truly receive, we cannot remain the same. We transform each other. We become plural; we carry the memory of others and their experience in our bodies, so we become carers and carriers of those seeds that have been transmitted to us. That is the beauty of the vernacular and of storytelling: there, the logic of reception is about having the capacity to listen in a way that we, after receiving those voices, carry them with us, and they can be transmitted again.

It has to do with an understanding of time where time is not the chronology of the clock. It is what I have come to call the ‘breath of time’. And the breath of time is that breath of life that is between emanation and dissolution, between the expression of lived stories, the struggle for not forgetting, and the silence that is necessary to carry them. And this is very unlike the text, because a text can be written, like so many academic articles, and never be received, and never be carried in an embodied memory, never become life. Whereas storytelling is seeding life, it’s transforming the life of the other, and is carried on. It is a very deep and powerful strategy against the economy of knowledge, against forgetfulness, against oblivion. And we know that the struggle against oblivion is a struggle for hope and for the possibility of joy.

Rosa: Storytelling has nothing to do with property or ownership of knowledge.

Rolando: This is the fundamental challenge to art schools, and to the future of art schools; because they have been training young artists to be owners, to be the authors, to develop new ideas, instead of training them to remember, to care, to host. In the same way, the resources of the planet are consumed to make art, while there is an active forgetting of the material history of those resources, for the sake of authorship and property. Storytelling belongs to a different logic, to a different temporality.

Rosa: I was wondering how you feel about the ‘global contemporary’ art world developing an awareness of all of this; of the material histories of resources, storytelling, plurality, which we see a lot ... Or perhaps also how your book Vistas of Modernity has been received; the chapter on listening is welcomed, but I think the understanding of ‘the end of the contemporary’ is less discussed. In other words, how or when are these notions embraced, and when are they co-opted?

Rolando: The decolonial is not so much a field of knowledge as it is a politics and an ethics. María Lugones said beautifully ‘I don’t think what I don’t do’. I think what you are describing is the ever-present risk of what some people would call ‘instruments of capture’, that will capture, for example, the decolonial, or the idea of storytelling, or the notion of relationality, that has been broadly used just to replace the idea of the network, for example. And so the terms are appropriated. Those who do it remain centred in the thing as the ‘that’ of the word, the property, and they forget its life, the politics, the ethics. That’s why it’s so essential to think of transformation, because it’s not just about transmitting these words, or teaching those concepts, because the concepts are captured and they keep on being used for coloniality, for appropriation, to further the project of modernity. We must be aware of the perversion of the decolonial when it becomes a tool for cultural venues like museums or biennales, to continue on appropriating and exposing the worlds of others, for the white gaze, that is, without changing the politics, without changing the ethics. In this way, the decolonial becomes instrumentalised to further the colonial project.

Rosa: As an artist, designer, dancer, architect, or whatever ‘creative industries professional’, you are trained to think you can change the world. Probably designers more so than others, I don’t know. You are hailed as the one who is going to come up with ‘something else’, something supposedly meaningful. That is a burden indeed. A completely different understanding of what ‘creativity’ is, to what we learn in these schools, is urgently required. What is ‘creativity’, what do we understand as ‘meaningful’, and on what scale?

Rolando: It is a shift from the godlike view of the designer or the artist that will bring something into the world—the godlike power—towards forms of creation that are more like cultivation, nurturing, harvesting; forms of creation that have to do with the relation. So, for example, in the Arhuaco's woven bag, the 'Tutu' or 'mochila' from Colombia, or in the Bizen ceramics of Japan, what you see there is a relational creation, a dwelling in and with the world.[5]

Dwelling has to do with understanding, experiencing, and practising our position in relation to other people, to community, to ancestrality, but also to Earth, and to the others of the world, in such a way that our engagement becomes that of articulating the relational. It is to be weavers of Earth-histories, of communities, and of times. They say that the masters of the Bizen ceramics of Japan are those that manage, with the wisdom of their hands and in the relation between earth and fire, to bring to expression Earth’s colours and movement. That means the colours have not been designed, nor chosen in the palette of Photoshop, but that they come forth in relation and express this relation between Earth, fire, and memory. We see the same movement of relational creation in the Tutu, the woven bag from Sierra Nevada, Colombia. These are relational creations; forms that do not speak of a single self but of a deep relation with Earth-histories, with ancestral-Earth. It’s a relational vernacular that expresses a cultivation of life, the dwelling on Earth, instead of the destruction of life and extraction from Earth to produce the creation of the singular genius, of the godlike designer. The colour of plastic, for example, is very different from the pigment—artists engaging with pigments from the Earth find colours that come through plants and minerals. In this practice, colour expresses relations: a relation to a stone, to a plant, to a territory, to an ecology. Crafting a pigment in relation is very different from just choosing a codified colour from a matrix of possibilities on a computer, because that codified colour is not weaved in a relation.

The relational carries a strong response to climate collapse and to the collapse of the weave of life and the weave of communal life. In our institutions, we need to challenge the enclosure of the individual self, and allow for those processes of relation as creative processes. I think that before the modern world came up, and with it the individual, the portrait, the renaissance, colonialism, etc., there was not such a thing as an individual artist. Not only did the artist not think of itself as one author, but art itself was a relation. It was not focused on the ownership of the single self; it was not a discrete, singular practice. It was a practice of relating and creating worlds that resonate with others, with difference, with the Earth, with Earthbeings, with community, with a vernacular, with ancestrality. So it was about opening a reality—worldmaking indeed—but not through the arrogance of the godlike gaze or the imperial dreams of controlling the Earth and the world of others in order to produce one’s own reality, you know?

Rosa: I wanted to go back to the classroom to think about pedagogy and the question of the historical subject. Naming a position has always been a seemingly important part of art education: develop an awareness of ‘your position in the field’ and write about it. Now we often hear about ‘positionality’, and people start to talk about identity in terms of enclosure. What are the ways we can start understanding ourselves as historical subjects?

Rolando: In the classroom, we use what we have called the pedagogies of positionality, pedagogies of relationality, and pedagogies of transition. When it comes to positionality, we first explain that it is not about one’s identity, it is not ‘what I think of myself’. Because that accommodates, let’s say, the economy of the false innocence of the modern subject, creating an image of itself that is good or cool or advanced or whatever it might be, the image that often manifests on our social media, right? Marketing the self, in a way. And the question of positionality is not about this false innocence, it’s about actually going underneath that to ask who are we as social-historical beings? Who are we in relation to the colonial difference? In relation to the loss of Earth, of Earthlessness, to the loss of worlds, to worldlessness, and to the loss of communal memory? Who are we in relation to the communities that are around us and before us? We work out who we are as Earth-historical beings in the world. Who is making our clothes, who is making our food, which rainforests are being consumed for us to have our batteries, our electronics, our palm oil, our soap? Positionality really goes against the grain of that false innocence of the arrogant self. It is a difficult process. Students tell us that this awareness is difficult to unfold and bear. But at the same time it is really important to go through this process, to go through that humbling and overcoming the false innocence of the image of the self.

The work of positionality is present, for example, when reading about the west from the perspectives of the Global South, importantly, from the perspectives of women of colour. Western students see themselves for the first time being named by another positionality. The analysis and naming of whiteness, for example, suddenly de-centres the normative positions in the global north’s classrooms, and challenges that artificial position of innocence, and that artificial centrality in the world. This movement enables a concrete consciousness of how they are implicated in the suffering of others and the consumption of the life of Earth. This is a way of engaging with the ethical question: Can we live an ethical life when our wellbeing and sense of self is dependent on the destruction of Earth and the consumption of the life of others? Whilst the mask of false innocence collapses, we glimpse the possibility of working with who we really are, as positioned selves, as Earth-historical and social beings.

And then we move towards pedagogies of relationality, when suddenly we can relate to each other because we know where we are positioned. We know that many of us, especially in a classroom, share this problematic position in the world, this implicatedness. We know that we are not the centre of the world, and we begin appreciating other positions as positions that can enrich our understanding of diversity but also the understanding of our social and Earth-historical selves. Relationality also becomes a place of, let’s say, cultivation of knowledge that is very different to the one directed—the acquisition of information. So here what we were saying about the storyteller comes back.

And then we think of pedagogies of transition, which are possible once we are in relation to others, once we are conscious of our false innocence. What can we do to produce a world that really moves towards a horizon of justice, of hope, of joy, in a more truthful way, so in a non-universal way, but also in a non-reductivistic way? It is not just about denying the meta-narratives of universality and moving towards fluidity and the relativity of all positions, but it’s about moving towards positioned engagements, realising that I can do things when I know my positionality.

In this sense, the pedagogies of transition are really meaningful and liberating, because the single subject that is isolated when it’s presented with a big crisis in the world, of climate collapse, social injustice, racism, patriarchy, ends up feeling impotent to do anything and sometimes ends up in cynicism, indolence, indifference, or apathy. Whereas when you’re positioned, you know you’re in a more truthful space, where you can be activated, where you can be compassionate, but you are not carrying on your shoulders the whole pressure of the world. You know where you are, and you know that you can do very simple and concrete things with others, in relation. So that single self that the system produces—our knowledge system as well and the consumer system—is a self that suffers a lot, because it’s forced towards indolence or cynicism and towards this incredible arrogant ignorance in the face of the world, as a single self that is looking from the outside at this abstract big world that is in trouble. This indolence, this absence from the world of others, is suffocating for the young generation; to see this world and feel themselves impotent, incapable of doing anything, and in the condition of apathy.

So how can we move towards compassion, that means being moved by others? How can we be in relation with others, and be moved beyond ourselves? How can we know and experience that there are things greater than ourselves that can move us, that can transform us, hence the importance of the gratefulness and grace that we were talking about? The relational self, the non-dominant self, is a self that has lost its arrogance, its false innocence, and that recovers the possibility of hope in the recognition of our deep relations with each other and with Earth.