Episode 99 is a shorter offering with the wise, wonderful and humble Azul Carolina Duque.

Azul is a Colombian artist and educator. Her artistic practice is about relating to embodied sound as a tool for re-membering ourselves out of our collective denials.

These explorations are informed by her training as a musician, a death doula and a clown.

She is also on the path of relating to music as a living entity, as opposed to a product to be consumed.

She is a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective, which you may recall from Episode 96 with Vanessa Andreotti - author of Hospicing Modernity and co-founder of the collective.

GTDF is a trans-disciplinary multi-generational art/research collective that develops technologies of inquiry through artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being.

GTDF is also about hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as attention to the lessons these deaths offer, while also assisting with the birth of new and potentially wiser worlds.

This was recorded in my garden in the summer, during a small gathering of West Country crew as Azul was visiting the UK.

This is in my opinion a beautiful taster of the deep, powerful, complex work that Azul and the collective are focussed on with deep humility, honesty and often humour.

Azul speaks to seeing the Earth as a living entity and recognising the entanglement between humans, land and all life.

About the importance of acknowledging and embracing complexity, including the uncomfortable and painful aspects of our current reality and the relational and cognitive challenges we are facing.

She speaks to modernity and colonialism as forces of separation, the dis-ease of separation, urging a shift towards relational approaches developed alongside indigenous knowledge.

Azul emphasises the significance of composting work, both internally and externally, sitting with the s**t so that we process properly and don’t continue to pass it down to the next generation.

She also speaks to the critical role of elders, rites of passage, and the transition between life stages in fostering a sense of service and responsibility to life on Earth.

The conversation also includes some beautiful questions from crew who had gathered in the garden on what was a sweltering hot afternoon.

So I hope you enjoy this, Azul is in my opinion a remarkable human, and a wonderful storyteller as you will hear, carrying vast wisdom beyond her years, and shows up with great humility and compassion and playfulness , dedicating her young life to this work

We are very lucky to have her on board Spaceship Earth.

LINKS

https://decolonialfutures.net/

https://decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity/

Into the Dark - 5 week community winter adventure with Becoming Crew