Decolonial Work

An exploration of moving beyond efforts to perfect the “visible structures of knowledge, power, and legitimacy“, through for example “institutional reforms, language policing, and compliance-driven inclusion efforts”, which focus on “moral purification” and “performative correction”. Instead we are encouraged to delve deeper, getting underneath with a “meta-critical, metabolic approach” focused on “tending to the soil, the fungi, and the unseen networks of relationality that sustain life,” which requires us to engage with decay and decomposition “as necessary elements of change, rather than failures to be avoided”. We are offered a table that compares a control-based ‘pruning the bonsai’ approach with a meta-critical ‘metabolising decay’ approach. Doing this deepest work “is not about perfecting what exists – it is about clearing space for what is yet to come.”