ROÑEMONGETA

LAND BORDERING DESIGN TECHNOLOGIES | Roñe’e yvype guará. Author: P.Vera. Publication in American Computing Association (ACM) Interactions journal August 2022

Full article on link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u7DCxGV-kHj72PzRuMYLMTNxKKOiSlOi/view?usp=drive_link

"Our bodies and geographies of selves made up of diverse, bordering and overlapping "countries". We are all composed of information, billions of bits of cultural knowledge superimposing many categories of communication" (Anzaldua, 2015)

Latina scholar Paula Moya wrote the essay entitled Who we are and from where we speak (2011), referencing Latin American decolonial theorist Enrique Dussel’s arguments in his book Philosophy of Liberation. As she reflects on identity, Moya points out that “the political and epistemic significance of different kinds of identities matters for the kind of knowledge we produce.” For me this means that who we are, and the recognition of our own histories define

how we make and exist in the world. As key vehicle for my research, I developed a land-based methodology in design and pedagogy that I define as Land-bordering, which captures the transmission of memories and lived experiences  as they connect to the land and the intersections (borderlands) that influenced those experiences. It is making “with” the land that allows a space of sympoiesis (Haraway 1988-2005) and possibilities.

Utilizing Land-bordering, I propose a design process of dismantling the colonial structures and concepts of modernity in the design field and its exaltation of the individual and the universal, by looking back, re-reading place and its history, recognizing its Indigenous sovereignty and bringing in our own original epistemologies from the Global South and the Global North.

“As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover...I am cultureless, because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural, religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanic and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet”

(Gloria Anzaldua, 2014)

Gloria’s voice resonates in my soul. When I read Borderlands, La Frontera, for the first time a while ago, my heart opened its wounds in company. Wounds caused by discrimination, by homophobia, by being an orphan.

My homeground, Paraguay, with a sexist, homophobic and racist society didn’t want me. My homeland, Canada, didn’t know what to do with me. I was the other, the one from the shadows, the “unseen other” (Sarah Ahmed, 2012). 

The borderlands as intersectional margins define who I am: Latina, Queer, Mestiza, Brown, Woman. When we see ourselves represented, we claim our Identity. When we see the endless whiteness of the Global North, we hide our souls in the margins, we merge, we don’t contest, we colonize ourselves over and over again.

Borderlands as physical margins are limits of soil and material distance. Borderlands as intersectional margins are borderlines that are marked in our souls as carved wounds defined by a culture that we abide by or not.

When we recognize ourselves within our identities we are cultured, we build community, we start “worlding-with”. We create that new world that Gloria calls a new “value system” that connect us to each other and to the planet. 

Thus, I situate ourselves in the "pluriverse", the “multiverse”. a "world of many worlds" that always existed, where we listen and we make our voices visible.  

"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." (Audre Lorde, p.95, 1981)

Gender is one of the intersections that define my cultural identity as a Latinx Queer Woman.Gender and our sexual identity converge with our racial identity, the language that we speak, our colour, our class in society and make us build our relationships with others based on them. For sexual minorities, this identity becomes many times the reason to be marginalized or discriminated and along with being a woman it creates the perfect combo for social injustice.

Racism and discrimination are cultural borders which limit the possibility of marginalized minorities to be part of society with equality and inclusion. Racism comes from ignorance and indiference. It gives capitalism a convenient

landscape to regurgitate over and over the same rethoric, perpetuating systemic opression and negation of the other.

To disrupt the master's house we need to be political, emerge from the borders with pride and the power of our freed souls.

We need to seek emancipation, justice and scream out loud our truth: We want NO more white male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist cultures, education and societies. NO more colonization, no more perpetuation of endemic capitalist, individualistic, neo-liberalist, modernist structures. NO more Masters' whips and chains.{NO MORE.}

“Ideas run, like rivers, from the south to the north and are transformed into tributaries in major waves of thought. But just as in the global mar-ket for material goods, ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product. Thus, a canon is formed for a new field of social scientific discourse, postcolonial think-ing. This canon makes visible certain themes and sources but leaves others in the shadows” (Silvia R.Cusicanqui 2020)

The colonial rivers in the Global North are wild, dangerous and cold. Systemic racism comes many times from ignorance or disdain to try to learn how other cosmologies and cultures work. People from places of privilege that were educated and lived their whole life in the Global North, decide if and how our voices are important or not. They also support the dark skin when it comes from that same background, people without an accent and educated in that same Global North. That's comfortable and palatable: "the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness" (A.Lourde, 1984)

The pluriverse and its clear decolonial intent is also often monetized, transformed into a commodity. It departs from recognizing the land, it denies it by being utilized as a pseudo anti-colonial discourse, that in reality only legitimates the same structures of colonial power that it opposes. Landless-ness: the absence of reckoning the place where we are situated and its original history and Indigenous Sovereignty.

In America, both North and South, that is convenient for the colonial matrix of domination because recognizing the land and its history is to recognize that it was stolen, invaded and that the peoples that own it, were decimated, butchered and massacred and as of Today they keep being marginalized, racialized, violated and stolen over and over again.

“How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritalization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?...Rhizomes:

connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order." (Deleuze & Guattari 1987)

"Our bodies and geographies of selves made up of diverse, bordering and overlapping "countries". We are all composed of information, billions of bits of cultural knowledge superimposing many categories of communication" (Anzaldua, 2015)

In this imaginary dialogue between Deleuze and Guattari and Gloria Anzaldua's there is a juxtaposition that confronts the concept of the sole "tree" and its individual roots with the concept of "rhizomes" as webs of identity, networks of multiple heterogeneous connections that communicate to each other within their own multiplicity.

Being in the borders, migrating from the soil that held us captive as bastards of a colonial memory, intersects the notion of our "mestizaje" as a contraption, an imperfect and unique machine that reinvents itself in thousands of identity webs. We are "uno" that is multiple, we carry our ancestors, our soil, the unforgotten history of our Indigenous identity.

In my research I study our intersections in this vast sea of connections. A web that expose our inner selves to the complexity of our different identities but that also gives us the space to build community, to co-exist and co-create.

Therefore the sole tree, with roots that feed only for themselves serving the lone tree is a  metaphor of the individual modernist Neo liberal model that exacerbates the destruction of our world. Extractionism that doesn't look around, that even proposes nowadays, in the delirium tremens of very egotistic men like Bezos and Branson, to go beyond our planet, and keep colonizing, keep destroying enacting the mere concept of the disposability of our planet earth. To counterpose the menace of coloniality, our webs of selves encounter each other looking forward to our history, being from the earth and for the earth, acknowledging place, its relations and ourselves. Futures that are built in a effort  to restore ecologies through heterogeneity, empathy and care.

"Designing collaboratively with people (co-design) is to immerse in emergence and chance while attuning into slippery, un-namable tones and expressions that can only be sensed through our feelings and bodily encounters in relation to other people, materials and entities so that we embrace that we are creating, transforming and becoming together among this heterogeneity.This notion of the perceiver transforming while being transformed by their interventions and surrounding conditions is a significant ontological shift in co-design to articulate what it's like to be immersed in the moments of change and how this is constantly evolving and becoming" (Akama 2015,p.264)

If we acknowledge uncertainty as inevitable and not something that we can avert or regulate against, then we can begin to seek ways in which to harness it for productivity purposes." (p.59-60)

Foucault describes the world at the end of the XVI century: "The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man." It accounts for almost one hundred years after the great "discovery" of the new world. At that time, most indigenous peoples in America were either exterminated, subdued or enslaved. The colonies were very much settled and so the seed of the new system of the modern world. The European man (as male as it sounds) was the main actor. Resources in their plenitude were extracted to serve and feed the “old world.” That’s when we started lying to ourselves about an universal desire. When greed and power were consolidated based on hegemony, similitudes and beliefs promoted as salvation of the savages and service to pseudo God’s empires: Spanish, British, Portuguese, French, Dutch and so on. The table was set and this western man was having a banquet. Creation and discovery were the words, that stablished as a canon, the positional superiority of western knowledge. There was no room to build things but by following and copying the European models of “civilization.” 

Western history plays its role as a reminder of the facts. Indigenous knowledge plays its role as a witness of histories that persisted and were preserved by memories of the land carved in souls that never forget.

Co-creation is emergence. It proposes the acknowledgement of being part of an ecosystem where we co-exist, where humans and non humans transcend time in worlds that ended and started many times. Uncertainty for me is hope. It sets the conviction that we don’t know and that we will never know it all. That “The Future is Indigenous” as Jason Lewis states. As whereas Indigenous means being native, being of the land and therefore being of nature and of the world. Then creating in design means something different. It means heterogeneity. It means an effort within community. It means being “landed”, “placed” within an ecosystem where we co-create with other humans and non humans, transgressing binaries and promoting alternative futures. 

“There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as "islands in a far sea" and as "a sea of islands”The first emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centers of power. Focusing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships.” (Epeli Hau‘Ofa, 1993)

Colloqui-ing is dialogui-ng, communicat-ing, connect-ing. When we pause and look around us we see the world and the multiple possibilities of doing, making and designing our present to become and emerge towards ecologies of planetary care.

Listen-ing is probably the most important design methodology. Learn-ing from the acknowledgment of incommensurable layers of unknowns and thus of possibilities. Listen-ing to Dr. Yoko Akama talk about Hau'Ofa's writings that explains the cosmovision from Oceanic peoples of the sea brought to me, more than anything  a lot of hope. How looking at the ocean as that non human being that holds billions of other beings, we can understand the vital importance of maintaining and building connections.

Indigenous epistemologies never exist without Mother Earth's presence. The sea of islands that Epeli Hau'Ofa describes is vast, immense. It contains and supports life. It cares and transcends the waters. It goes up and beyond the skies. It connects to the stars to guide way finders, it connects to the fish to bring food and to nurture life.

The world is a sea of connections, those rhizomes that reach to each other no matter what. Connect-ing becomes reaching out, positioning our heterogeneity, our borderlands and diversity in a place of care. The social interaction defined as the act of communicat-ing among beings create emergences within that sea of connections. It defeats colonial  thinking, it confronts the naked truth of a capitalist model that doesn't work and never worked.

This sea of connections is the space to unlearn modernism. It is the pluriversal design space for decolonization.

"Inclusion could be read as a technology of governance: not only a way of bringing those who have been recognized as strangers, but also making strangers into subjects, those who in being included are also willing to consent to the terms of inclusion." (p.163)

"The promise for diversity is the promise of happiness: as if in becoming happy or in wanting "just happiness: we can put racism behind us." (p.165)

"Diversity work not simply generate knowledge about institutions...it generates knowledge of institutions in the process of attempting to transform them. We could also think of diversity as praxis. Drawing on this Radical tradition, Paulo Freire defines praxis as: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.(1970) I want to offer a different way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and transformation: Rather than suggesting that knowledge leads to transformation, I offer a reversal that in my view preserves the point or aim of the argument: transformation as a form of practical labour leads to knowledge" ( Sarah Ahmed, 2012, p.173)

Emergences of a diasporic soul converge in moments of reflection. Inclusion is proposed as a way of doing something good in order to bring a promise of “happiness” for the marginalized being. Is that inclusion or assimilation? 

How many times the others’ voices say? How many times the others’ voices ask? How many times the others’ voices scream while their bodies bleed?

In academic institutions fairness or rightness is accompanied by obscure patterns of colonial desires. The rights and wrongs are determined by the canons that subsisted the winds of change always and ever.

Thus, we know, thus we search, thus we get always the same response. Intersections as marginal borders become real when the woman, the colored, the activist, the contester has something to say that punches and that questions the status quo. Inclusion is assimilation as defined by the structures of power. They don’t want us to be included. They want us to follow, to bow, to engage in a perpetual act of conformism. “Multiculturalism is an act of assimilation.” (A.Escobar,2021)

When Inclusion of diversity becomes a commodity for white supremacist structures, it gets presented as an aggregated value that is collected as a single set of knowledge which is attributed to an exotic and intriguing alternative world. This is done by denying that original cultures have their own intrinsic ways of being, knowing and doing in relationship to nature and their particular cosmovision. 

Conveying L.Tuhiwai Smith thinking: Ideas about the nature of knowledge and the validity of specific knowledge, became as much commodities of colonial exploitation.

Aggregating alternative epistemologies in a same bag, conforms with colonial standards of classification. The others are all the same, in different shades of darkness, in different sets of languages and costumes, but ultimately always from a lesser intellect and race. Otherness is related to weakness and to having a permanent capability of being subdued and conquered.

"Modernism is more than a representation of fragments from the cultural archive in new contexts. 'Discoveries' about and from the 'new world' expanded and challenged ideas the West held about itself. The production of knowledge, new knowledge and transformed 'old' knowledge, ideas about the nature of knowledge and the validity of specific knowledge, became as much commodities of colonial exploitation as other natural resources. Indigenous peoples were classified alongside the flora and fauna; hierarchical typologies of humanity and systems of representation were fueled by new discoveries; and cultural maps were charted and territories claimed by the major European powers. Hence some Indigenous peoples were ranked above others in terms of such things as the belief that they were 'nearly human', 'almost human' or 'sub-human'. This often depended on wether the peoples concerned possessed a soul and could therefore be offered salvation and wether or not they were educable and could be offered schooling. These systems for organizing, classifying and storing new knowledge constituted research. In colonial context, however,  this research was undeniably also about power and domination. The instruments and technologies of research were also instruments for legitimating various colonial practices." 

(Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 2021, p.68-69)

Whilst white scholars preach that alternative epistemologies are welcomed and “included.” Why do they still talk about the modernist canons and structures as the only valid models? Why, specifically in design, we still receive in classrooms, instruction that promotes the universal, the individualistic human being as the center of  the world? I believe that it is because the methodology of assimilation that modernism proposes also implies systematic appropriation. The ideas and new knowledge collected from Indigenous or alternative epistemologies are extracted, converted and subverted. It is part of the project of “enlightenment” that organizes knowledge and classifies it bringing in the rational, individualistic and humanistic approach of (Neo)liberalism that presents “Modernism as a representation of fragments from the cultural archive in new contexts” (L.Tuhiwai S.2021)

In my research I propose dismantling the colonial structures and concepts of modernist design that exacerbate the individual and the universal, by looking back, re-reading place and its history, but also bringing in our own positionality. 

I propose a methodology that I define as Land-bordering, which captures the transmission of memories and lived experiences as they connect to the land and the intersections that influenced that experience.

I believe that we can deconstruct the standard modern canons, by acknowledging the land where we are situated and by building a community of shared knowledge in a respectful and participative way. Therefore we don’t abide to a universal world which focuses on individual progress. What we do is to look into the pluriverse where many worlds can co-exist.

"What is becoming clear to Indigenous educators is that any attempt to decolonize ourselves and actively resist colonial paradigms is a complex and daunting task. We cannot continue to allow Indigenous students to be given a fragmented existence in a curriculum that offers them only a distorted or shattered mirror; nor should they be denied an understanding of the historical context that has created that fragmentation." (Marie Battiste, 2013) 

Colonial education and its structure erased much of the aboriginal literacy that was part of the rich cultural background of aboriginal peoples in America.

 Religious doctrines that came to America to “civilize” and “christianize” the barbaric “Indians” put a lot of effort into deleting or deviating aboriginal ways of knowing and communicating. It not only denied the value of these different literary traditions but also tried to instill Eurocentric knowledge and written literacy as the only valid way of education. 

In Paraguay, the Jesuits with their “Missions”- (1587-1767) created an infrastructure during two centuries where every aspect of European culture was transferred to the aboriginal peoples as the ultimate way of living. They stablished the written guarani language, adopting the latin alphabet with specific grammatical and orthographical rules similar to Spanish language. 

I am studying the possibilities of decolonizing design through rewiring the memory of voices that once heard, were disfigured and confused with colonial knowledge. The guarani language which was printed and “hotwired” as if that would make it better, “civilized” testifies the recurrence of colonial erasure and assimilation in America.

The horrific history of residential schools in Canada, where the Catholic church in complicity with the Canadian government perpetrated vile acts of abuse and pure evil against Indigenous children, and the still existing colonial educational curriculums in many American countries, are just examples of the broad and systemic damage to aboriginal cultures and how urgent is to work on decolonizing education in America.

The current systems perpetuate erasure and genocide. 

The current systems are criminal because people keep dying Today. Not only by the abuser's hand, which still also exists, but also by suicide, by overdose, by indifference, by marginalization, by extractivism, by displacement, 

by bigotry and by denial.

AMOMBEU'TA NDEVE CHE RETA TEMBIASAKUE

Telling my land history | Contando la historia de mi Tierra

In Guarani cosmovision, we have two souls: the soul of the body: “ã” and the soul of the spirit: “ñe”, which means language, sound with sense. This soul is located in the throat of beings and it expresses itself through speaking, singing, praying, reflecting.

The “Teko Porã”, el buen vivir or good living is the Guarani way of living, where the souls coexist and through an embodied experience with the land, living is a quest for the ” land without evil”: Yvy mara’ei.

 I reflect back on language as a manifestation of my soul, as the place where I can go back to layers upon layers of memories, where identity brings upfront my different intersections. In the “Pluricosmos”, place is also more than human. It represents the cosmologies of every of its inhabitants. It goes beyond ourselves and our relationships. It transcends the materiality of our human needs. Listening to the land, we learn that our communities, our relationships go beyond our human existence. The other species, nature, its multiple creatures and non-creatures are equally part of the ecology of the world.The soul transcends the human, inhabits the pluricosmos. As a sort of auto-ethnographic introspection, I reflect on my diaspora, that journey that brought me here to this land. 

"Ko tenda ñu rei ogueru che nderape iñe’e yvoty. Opuka ha amo’ a’y hágui ajuhu. Aipota peteī yvy porã. Aipota peteī yvy sã’y ha guasu. Peteī yvy roñemongeta hagua ha rokunu’u hagua heta ara ambue”

"This remote land brings to me its soul in poetry, as a word that blooms in a sudden laugh. A word in a land that I want. A land that is free and vast, a land where we can talk and love for many days to come." (A poem in Guarani, 2021)

I presented at Cumulus Guayaquil 2021. It was a truly wonderful and enriching experience to share with this incredible community. Ecologies of knowledge with strong relations to land, culture and Latin-American epistemologies. An inspiring gathering to imagine, in company, communities and futures to come.

https://www.cumulusguayaquil2021.org

Track 1: Crisis, criticism, and creation

Our present has emerged as a time of crises: economic, geopolitical, epistemological, sanitarian, and climate. Such crises are so dramatically intertwined that it becomes difficult to imagine concrete alternatives. However, a crisis is not the end of the world, but rather an opportunity to critically reflect on it and the genealogy that has led us to our current state. And, because the best defence is a good offense, criticism, therefore, should be first of all a way of rethinking and redesigning the Age in which we live, radically changing our point of view and our outlook with respect to the future. If design is intended to make visible the invisible, to design the future is to make visible what will happen after the crisis, creating the social and cultural conditions for its completion. In this sense, it is particularly important to identify those crucial agents or issues that could be addressed in order to begin the process of re-imagining the world. We ask, then, starting from a local perspective, is it possible to establish the South as a strategical place of enunciation to reconcile critical analysis of the present with acts of creation? Which social experiences, artistic practices and activist projects seem to embody, within the crisis, this effort? Which theoretical and artistic trajectories are committed to a counter-hegemonic critique of the present that could also be considered a creation?