Sensing Worlds

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’ (1987)

Taking epistemologies of the South as points of departure, and thinking with and through spaces and people who have been marginalized and silenced due to capitalism and colonialism, as well as those who resist these forms of oppression, this series of South-South exchanges centres knowledges, experiences, and praxes to explore various aspects of translating, knowing, and sensing worlds. Through conversations and performance lectures, knowledge makers and practitioners from many fields engage a specific embodied sense through which multiple meanings and praxes of knowing and worlding are unpacked. In the process, they interrogate the dominant ordering and conceptualization of the senses and reconfigure how worlds are experienced, while grappling with the question of translation and its directionality. That is, who is the imaginary Other for whom knowledge makers of the South translate themselves and their works? What frames of reference are being used? Whose ears, eyes, and senses are they addressing? Towards what spaces and geographies do they translate and why? Finally, how can we imagine a flow of translation from and to the South-South axis? In engaging with these questions, the programme seeks to explore, theorize, and expand the horizon on ways of knowing, being, and relating in the South, thus opening a critical reckoning and recognition of representations and understandings of ‘world’, interconnectedness, and disjuncture. Animated by the logics of disruption, recovery, relation, and creation, Sensing Worlds advances a pluriversal view of the world that embraces horizontality and dialogue and seeks to construct new ways of living together, ones built not so much on sameness as on multiplicity and difference.

This project is co-conceptualized with meLê yamomo.