Anaïs Sägesser and Naveen Shamsudhin
In response to the challenges presented by polycrisis, there is a need to explore and bring into practice the deep leverage points for societal transformation. The current polycrisis has its roots in colonialism and entangled capitalism with a history of domination over both other human beings and the natural world per se. Drawing inspiration from Fanon’s insights (1961) that colonisation extends beyond bodies to encompass minds, this exploration prompts a call for an embodied “Epistemic Disobedience,” as termed by Mignolo (2009). Our bodyminds, subjected to interlocking systems of oppression and colonisation and shrivelled into narrow emotional, epistemological and ontological corsets, call for an embodied and relational approach to decolonisation.
In this paper, we present the development of such an approach, the DecolonizeBODYMinds (DBM) method (which draws from transformative learning theory and Movement for Life) and present its application in the form of two workshops on the topic of decolonisation as part of the Deal with It exhibition exploring the colonial legacy of the city of Basel, Switzerland. The design and approach to these workshops are described in detail alongside an evaluation of participants’ experiences collected through a survey.
The approach is then theorised and critically examined. The DBM method puts theory into practice through an embodied approach. This approach intentionally triggers emotions like fear, shame, guilt, etc and diminutive states of embodiment such as powerlessness and hopelessness, which are present in bodyminds experiencing internalised oppression and works through them through creative and relational embodied expression and release using dance, partner work, art-making and generative dialogue. In a safe enough space (Singer-Brodowski et al., 2022), it allows us to embrace liminality and have a collective space where new meaning-making and a shift of action can be catalysed. It opens up the space to de-link our ways of knowing and allows for onto-epistemological shifts that are deep levers of systems change. It thus puts decoloniality both as a means to an end and an end in itself.
KEYWORDS: decoloniality, transformative learning, embodiment, leverage points