Radical Tenderness is called upon by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective as a political practice of healing that invites us to attune ourselves to the living metabolism of the planet, which has an intelligence far beyond what humans can fathom. We systemically deny our entanglement with the Earth—the land, the water, its many beings and spirits, cycles and trauma—and separate ourselves from its bio-intelligence. The limits of human understanding of this cannot be overcome through business-as-usual approaches that are readily offered in modern society.   

The invitation to “reattune to metabolic entanglement” through radical tenderness consists of making ourselves more available to re-learn, to co-sense our inseparability from all other living beings on the planet, and from the planet itself. We are part of a very complex and multi-layered web of relations which are in constant movement and which require continuous care and digestion. It’s not only about connecting to/through the “good stuff,” but also about composting individual and systemic shit that is part of the metabolic cycles we are part of. Facing the unsustainability of modernity and its interconnected violences is not easy. It hurts our multiple and interdependent bodies in so many different ways, a reality that is being further exposed by the covid-19 pandemic as well as the many other emergencies related to the climate crisis.

Through the pedagogical-affective invitations of Radical Tenderness, the GTDF collective has been nurturing an affective space for confronting the complexity of the problems we are implicated in. This approach invites us to move away from the prescriptive politics that are usually encouraged and rewarded within modernity/coloniality. These politics of intellectual certainty, human exceptionalism, false securities, and consumptive entitlement deepen our separation from the planet’s metabolism. Radical Tenderness, as a healing practice, asks us to disinvest from such politics and to try to listen to what is beyond what we can understand or even imagine.

Experimenting with this healing practice to reattune to metabolic entanglement, the collective has been creating a poetic landscape of its intimate and collective (un)learnings, yearnings, and challenges, which have been collected in the text, Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness. This series invites artists to experiment with Radical Tenderness as a sensed-experience in their daily lives by creating performative rituals based on an encounter between the text and their own embodied poetics. Each artist chooses between 3-6 phrases in the text to create two ritual actions. The first is experienced locally by the artist and presented here in a format and duration of their choice. The second is created by the artist as an invitation to be experienced by others.

We have chosen to begin this curatorial experiment by working with Brazilian artists. As Brazilian curators of the series, we thought this was a good place to start because the modern system’s false promises have long been shattered by the country’s ongoing inequalities and violence towards Indigenous, POC, and LGBTQIA+ communities and the Earth itself, currently amplified by the far-right government of Bolsonaro. In this scenario it has become viscerally clear to many that the affective sensibility that can be summoned as resilience must be anchored in other realms of metabolic intelligence.

The articles in this series are featured in English, with Portuguese versions downloadable as PDFs.

Look the complete series here.