workshop

Abrazar la Palabra

Medicine and Cultural Healing
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Workshop guided by Taita Hernando Chindoy and Cristina Rodriguez, with the collaboration and translation of Milena Bonilla.

Rijksakademie Reading room
May 2 and 9 / 10.00 – 17.00
The workshop lasts two days, but it is possible to participate in only one of the days.

Participation is free of charge, registration via publicprogramme[at]rijksakademie.nl

This is an invitation to groups and people in the Netherlands who research, study, create and work on issues of territory, collectivity and education in the fields of arts and sciences from decolonial epistemologies that do not fall within the capitalist framework of life production.

Embrace the Word is a workshop guided by Taita Hernando Chindoy, Inga from Colombia and activist in biocultural rights and Cristina Rodriguez, mother, planter and pollinator of the word, in collaboration and with the translation of the artist, educator and researcher Milena Bonilla. It seeks to share notions of collective action, territory and cultural healing, preservation of biodiversity, and addressing extractivism on the planet. During the workshop, we will work on ways to establish horizontal relationships between art, science and ancestral knowledge from comprehensive work with plants as teachers, ontological and epistemic dissidences. We will share colonial concepts that inhabit the ways in which we have understood different notions of knowledge, and we will map initiatives to activate pluriversal knowledge from other spaces of formation, creation and/or coalition.

Programme:
This is the first moment a seed begins to grow its roots. The shape of the tree and what type of fruit will be harvested will emerge from our encounters.

Day 1 – May 2

WUASIKAMAS: Food and territorial sovereignty, traditional knowledge and spirituality.


10.00 – 13.00
Harmonization and planting, guided and facilitated by Cristina Rodríguez, with a subsequent talk giving context to the offering

Introduction of each of the participants in the workshop, checking-in, motivations

'Wasikamas: Guardians of the Earth'
Talk by Taita Hernando Chindoy in collaboration with and translation by Milena Bonilla. Milena will introduce historical aspects of the territory that is currently inhabited by the native and hybrid communities of the Sibundoy Valley. Taita Hernando will give a talk about her previous experience as a leader in the southern Colombian territory, community work, challenges encountered (epistemic, political, ontological) established within a contemporary colonial framework and the work of dialogue with different entities, both governmental and another kind.

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch

14.00 – 17.00
Conversation and questions from the morning talk

Workshop: word creation, languages, translations and consumption: Work with palabra-semilla (word-seed), the root-territory relationship, space for reunion with the origin, womb and umbilical connection with the territory. In this exercise, we will conceive seed words and germinate them individually or in small work groups to later share dendrites and conceive the notion of the network from the connections between words now converted into a node.

Closing – sharing (Chicha, coca tea), or Artemisia Vulgaris tea (foraged). Or all three drinks.

Day 2 – May 9

Mapping desire: Imagining weaves of solidarity with Pluriversity ËCONEÊRÃ

10.00 – 13.00
Talk and opening to a collective conversation: Community life, community work initiatives/collaboration and ways of living collectively, moving through the territory, creating** knowledge spaces for learning and biocultural survival in the diaspora or on the ground, by Hernando Chindoy and Cristina Rodríguez.

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch

14.00 – 17.00
Walk and gathering of teaching plants, open to co-creation with everyone. Conversation around the notion of 'Buen Vivir', which has been intuited or experienced in other latitudes of origin of the participants. Making tea or other forms of plant consumption.

Close and share with tea or cocktail.

** Connection/healing mind, heart and spirit.

Hernando Chindoy

Hernando Chindoy holds several recognitions for his labour as a social leader, among which stand out the Equator Prize 2015 (PNUD) for his work ‘Wuasikamas-El modelo del Pueblo Inga en Aponte‘, the title of Experto en Pueblos Indígenas, Derechos Humanos and Cooperación Internacional from the Universidad Carlos III, and a Ph.D. Honoris Causa from London University of the Arts.

From 2017 to 2022, Hernando spearheaded the creation of the National Organization AWAI of the Inga Indigenous people in Colombia, during which time he also contributed to the creation of the Inga Panamazonic Biocultural Pluriversity AWAI. 

 

Ana Cristina Rodriguez Muñoz

Mother, seeder and pollinator of the word for life. Mg. in Marketing from the University of Nariño, Colombia. Guardian of Wuasikamas territory, engaging plant medicine, mothering, ancestral knowledge and feminist collective practices. This, as part of the project for the building of ËCONEÊRÃ pluriversity.

Milena Bonilla

Milena Bonilla (RA 09/10) is a visual artist, educator and independent researcher, born in Bogotá, living and working in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice is currently invested in epistemic colonialism and the different ways in which its historical background and current structures affect organisms, language, imagery, social orders and the perception of history itself. Bonilla is also interested in information, practices and knowledge that propose and place particular questions about language and agency as ontological properties of humans only, and how this precept is embedded in the way in which economic policies under capitalism operate. 

Her work has been shown, screened and performed in the last years among others at Galeria Municipal do Porto; Nest (The Hague), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Museo del Oro Quimbaya (Armenia, Quindío, CO), MHKA (Antwerp), MACRO Museum (Rome), the European Social Science History Conference (Amsterdam), Konsthall C (Stockholm), Temporary Gallery (Cologne), MOCO (Montpellier), and The Mistake Room (Los Angeles). 

ËCONEÊRÃ virtual pluriversity

Abrazar la palabra is a space facilitated in the framework of the creation of ËCONEÊRÃ, virtual pluriversity. The 'Pluriversity' aims to be a space of education from and for indigenous, black and peasant communities in specific territories of the Americas. It seeks to strengthen the agency and traditional knowledge in groups that are facing the epistemic, ontological and ecological consequences of colonialism in their territories, which entails constant oppression from structural violence. The Pluriversity mission will be integrated at the intersection between the West and non-Western technologies of care, ecology and coexistence.

Artistic Ecologies

'Abrazar la palabra' is part of the two-year project 'Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances'. A collaboration between the Rijksakademie, What, How & for Whom/WHW and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit. The project consists of a series of artistic and educational activities that examine art’s social placement in relation to what art can do to tackle the devastating effects of the eco-social crisis. 
 

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