Seminar 4: 14 - 16 April 2026

“Be a little slow.. be a little late”

• Tomorrow
• Movement
• Death
• Distance
• Tangible
• Fugitive
• Fish
• Body
• (Re)fuse
• Life
• Diaspora
• Desireless
• Resistance

El tiempo no es línea, es círculo, donde tú luchas, yo recuerdo.

Time is not a line, it is a circle; where you struggle, I remember.

Las Negras, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

Every day I wake up and check the news to see if the American army has started bombing the homes of my family, friends, neighbors, and strangers in Cuba. Overwhelmed by helplessness and disbelief, I write to friends and acquaintances whose families share my family´s fate. They tell me they’re trying to stay calm and not lose their minds since there’s nothing they can do.

I don’t know how they manage it. I don’t know how their bodies endure exhaustion and suffocation, trapped on an island without escape. Even those who have left never truly abandon it. “You know how it is here,” -my Aunt Nancy tells me- “One way or another, we always get by.”

I mull over her words: “always,” “get by,” “one way or another.” There’s an implicit, unnamed “we.” Who does she include? A nation surviving on its best people’s perseverance? Our family—descendants of enslaved Africans, Chinese, and struggling workers? Or just herself?

I think of my Aunt: yet caring for everyone in our family; working tirelessly; sharing what little she had with relatives during the hungry 1990s; caring for her mother through illness until the end; now trying to piece together a family falling apart. Was she speaking for herself or for all like her? For the Black women in our family and community, for whom holding everything together seems second nature?

Isn’t “always” too long? Isn’t it too heavy a burden to carry the family and nation on their hips?

Perhaps it was the tone, not her words. Her voice carried no epic quality, no celebratory resistance. It was low, almost flat, as if she spoke from a place where surviving had become routine. Getting by was less a triumph, more a cycle of repetition: climbing out of the hole, the chains, the mud, the blackout, the scarcity, the crisis, the quagmire, the cyclones; entering and exiting the hole, the mud, the blackout over and over. Carrying on, simply doing what needs to be done, even when you no longer quite know why.

“No one can stand this,” my Mother says every time the power goes out for more than twenty-four hours. She is seventy-nine, and there is no drama in her voice, just a statement of fact. Yet she resists, endures, or persists. I don’t know the exact word. Perhaps none quite captures it.

My blood boils—or maybe it's bile, a sharp pain in my stomach—from the urge to act, to stop being a spectator. A friend told me we must survive to bear witness. Back home they say, "Here, dying isn’t an option." Survival is the only choice. Though most are religious, I think no one truly believes in an afterlife.

We create archives of resistance: we organize, name, and celebrate them. But I wonder if there is room—for what doesn’t fit there: exhaustion, weariness, resignation. I think of moments when the body no longer wants to hold on, of the barely whispered possibility that we all fear we might not keep going.

I return to my Aunt’s phrase: “one way or another.” What exactly does it mean? Is it a promise or a condemnation? Is she saying there’s always a solution or never any real escape? This expression suggests more than repetition—it hints at a continuous pattern, with each occurrence slightly different. Our continuity is made of small changes, minor adjustments, and subtle turns that keep us going a little longer, like barely detectable variations in a recurring song.

“Sweetie, you’ll see, better times are coming”—that’s what we used to say at home in the 90s during the food and fuel crisis. It was our way of cheering ourselves up, as if the crisis were temporary and time held hidden promises. At first, it sounded hopeful. Today, it’s a refrain we use with a tone only we understand, like an unintentional grimace. My brother is the only one who dares to question it: “We’ve been saying that since I was a child. I’m 40 now.” That says it all. What was once a comfort has turned into an echo—a tired joke with the bitterness of unfulfilled promises. Time keeps passing, repeating the same thing, juggling the same tasks just to put food on the table, squeezing bodies that are vitamin-deficient and less youthful. The phrase stays, a reminder that “better times” always end up somewhere undefined. Who said time is a line?

This leads me to ask: Where does all this persistence lead us? When we reflect or tell our stories, perhaps the goal is not only to find understanding but to keep alive the central question of how we resist and what that resistance truly means.

Perhaps the movement itself, going out to seek, feeling our way, pausing, is already a place, a checkpoint on a winding journey. If fatigue sets in along the path and the body asks for a break, we must learn to listen. Not all of us can turn pain into strength, nor always convert hardship into uplifting stories. Sometimes the journey is just that—a difficult road, not a transformation.

Yet something brings us here: inherited gestures, the masks our ancestors wore to survive, ways of sustaining ourselves we never chose but now inhabit us: the repetitive cutting of sugarcane under the tropical sun, the washing and ironing of endless piles of laundry, the rhythmic motion of cleaning boots, the gruelling hours spent at the charcoal stoves, the dancing and singing on Sundays to forget the ache in one’s bones, the pacts with the orisha, with the cartomancer, the midwife, with God. Between what we inherit and what we wish not to repeat, we search for ourselves.

I need to believe that everything I’ve learned and that has shaped me can help give meaning—however fragile—to these worlds that sometimes seem incomprehensible. Engaging with others through writing and conversation reaffirms that we are not merely surviving but also searching for meaning together.

“If someone had told me 30 years ago that this was going to be my old age, I wouldn’t have believed it,” my mother notes with resigned irony. She recognizes this future was unimaginable, not from lack of imagination, but because life didn’t follow expected progress. The new man and woman got lost or missed the map of reality. Her words reveal the gap between what was possible and what came to be; sometimes we simply end up where we can or where we’re allowed.

Later, after talking to my mother, I stepped out and bumped into the neighbor. She asks me, with kindness that isn’t always innocent, about the situation in my country. I tell her what I can. She, in an almost complicit slip, as if what I said carried no weight, asks assertively: “But Cubans are a bit rough, aren’t they?” I feel the blow before I fully understand. I silently ask all the forces of the universe and my ancestors to hold me up and not let me lose my composure.

I think of my aunt and "getting by one way or another," uncertain if it’s a strength or a curse. I reply—perhaps more to myself—that the United Nations General Assembly recognized the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as one of history’s gravest crimes. I add that Germany and former colonial powers abstained from the vote.

The words hang suspended; they do not explain, they pulse in the air, and somehow, allow me to move forward.

(...)

Seventy years in these folks’ world

The child I works for calls me girl

I say “HA! HA! HA! Yes ma’am!”

For workin’s sake

I’m too proud to bend and

Too poor to break

So…I laugh! Until my stomach ache

When I think about myself.

(...)

The Mask, Maya Angelou

We thank Dana, Despina, and Muyang for suggesting the texts that will form the core of these sessions—texts that have also helped, particularly me, to put my thoughts over the last few weeks into perspective.

Tuesday 14th:

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

Introduction to the 5 Confluences + Welcoming ourselves

Reading together introductory Text and Glossary

Briefing about July 

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

(way too) Slow reading

Noah’s Ark and the (re)fusal of the world

“So the Noahs are not those who are actually called Noah, carrying their culture with this name. Noahs are those whose names are covered by a humanity that claims to be universal but is in fact discriminatory. History exposes this colonial constitution of boarding in the face of the disaster. In July 1761, the slave ship Utile, chartered by the Compagnie francaise des Indes orientales (French East Indies Company), took on board 160 Malagasy men, women, and children at the port of Foulpointe in Madagascar with the intention of selling them in Mauritius. It was a special slave ship because there were also 142 crew members on board. En route, the frigate hit a sandbank off Tromelin Island and sank. Some of the enslaved who were locked in the hold perished in the shipwreck. The entire crew and the rest of the Malagasy managed to reach the shore of this flat and deserted island of 1 square kilometer. With the debris recovered from the ship, a new ship was built: an ark. On September 27th, 1761, after actively taking part in the construction of the ark, the eighty-eight remaining Malagasy were abandoned, while the masters and the freemen embarked, relieved. Fifteen years later, only seven  women and a baby were found alive on the island.”

This session will weave together readings from Malcolm Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology (quoted above) and a text by Ianna Hawkins Owen “Dead Tired” (co-facilitated with Muyang). This slow reading will be followed by a writing exercise in small groups.

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

Screening of film (1h27m) (don't publish for copyright reasons) 

Wednesday 15th: 

Please have a heavy breakfast because lunch will be late

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

Film screening recap 

(we’re too) Slow reading

We are running out of time. How do we make time? How do we waste it?

We propose that before we read the text, “The Time we Need” by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (co-facilitated with Dana Andrei), that we study through the writing of Marimba Ani, who in her book “Yurugu”, wrote about the threat of non-orthodox christianity in earliest developments of that faith. We ask the question, what is “orthodoxy” if not a demand to be on time? Marimba Ani shows us that orthodox Christianity eliminated alternative understandings of the gospel in order to maintain apostolic (institutional) control. “Orthodoxy” is a temporal concept - it demands that we adhere to what came before, to established traditions. Heresy is then a disobedient and badly timed refusal to march along with history as authorised.

When Europeans tell Africans, "You are behind, you are too slow" they are wielding the same logic that Ani identifies in the church's suppression of non-orthodoxy. They both say that there is only one legitimate path, one authorized timeline, and you are either on it or against it.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s text refuses this frame. "The time we need" suggests that time is not a single track but rather something that can be claimed, shaped, and in made from scratch., He asks, what if the problem is not that Africa is "behind," but that the very measure of time and the demand for urgency, for catching up, for development at a certain pace and towards a certain end is itself a colonial imposition?

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

The spice that you and I have brought is repertoire. Within it, is the labour, the land, the generations who knew when and how to harvest, how to dry, how to mix, how to blend… The colonial archive has discovered and captured the spice, fixed it into place, reduced it to a line item and encouraged production. But this binary breaks down when we eat together, when we share spices, with each stroke of the brush... Our spices are repertoire, memories of home, aromas, songs, laughs

We will sizzle through “The archive and the repertoire” by Diana Taylor (co-facilitated with Despina Sanida Crezia)

We will be sound making, grill cooking, time wasting

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

Film screening (tbd)

Thursday 16th:

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

Sound pieces presenting

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

Summit prep

Seminar 3: 9 - 11 March 2026

The Fire Last Time and The Burning Bush

A Glossary:

• Disenchantment
• Fire
• Trance
• Bush
• Bureaucracy
• African Accelerationism
• che che
• Insurgency
• Spirit

Day One: Fire

I will speak through fire.

The fire I am interested in is not only elemental. It is the fire we sat around as children, listening to elders braid oral histories into night air. Fire as archive. Fire as transmission technology. Fire as the first cinema, light flickering across faces as stories pass between generations.

But this fire is also “che che.” Fire as uprising. Fire as refusal. Fire as the ignition of anti-colonial struggle. In The Fire Last Time, I think about how landscapes hold embers of unfinished resistance. How plantations become warzones. How extraction smolders beneath infrastructure. The flame is both witness and accomplice.

We will screen Faya Dayi, Jessica Beshir’s meditation on Harar. In it, smoke becomes cosmology. Fire becomes trance, devotion, labor, exhaustion, longing. It refuses colonial time. It suspends the viewer inside an atmosphere where the spiritual and the political are inseparable. That temporal suspension, history smoldering rather than resolved, matters deeply to my own grammar of fire.

                                   Day Two: The Bush

Mushiba will take us into the bush.

In colonial and white environmentalist imaginaries, the bush is framed as hostile terrain, empty wilderness to be conquered, conserved, regulated, or feared. White environmentalism often wages a quiet war against the bush, clearing, fencing, disciplining, managing under the banner of preservation.

But for many African cosmologies, the bush is not absence. It is density. It is a psycho-spiritual field. A site of initiation. A refuge during armed struggle. A tactical landscape where one withdraws from colonial surveillance and reorganizes self.

We will screen Flame, Ingrid Sinclair’s film about women guerrilla fighters during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In Flame, the bush is not backdrop. It is infrastructure. It is training ground, hiding place, and crucible. It is where bodies are disciplined, solidarities forged, betrayals endured. The bush becomes both a sanctuary and a site of violence.

Fire and bush are not aesthetic categories in our practices. They are living epistemologies. They hold oral history, insurgency, initiation, and survival.

They are not silent.

“The bush burned, yet was not consumed.”

Book of Exodus 3:2

Seminar 2: 21 - 23 January 2026

Thin line between heaven and here

There’s a thin line between heaven and here. A thin line between the dark and the light.¹

Close your eyes for a moment and think in that dark. 

Picture a line in whatever form it may take. A strand of hair, a needle, a plane streaking across the sky, the horizon at dusk where the last light of the day fades into the night that comes. Think of these and other lines – lines that divide nothing and connect everything. 

In this scene from the wire, a character by the name of Bubbles is dropped off at his corner. He has just come from the green fields and broad daylight of the suburbs – a world of perfect order, of children playing football in the clearest light of day. A heaven, perhaps. Now he returns back to his ‘here’ - to the worn brick, the chain linked fences, the stuttering lights and the children whose games are shrouded in darkness and mystery. 

Officer McNulty asks him, “is this good for you?”

Bubbles replies: “Mhmm”

“There’s a thin line between heaven and here”

Listen to the space in this thin line. It’s a geographical line, of course. A line separating the suburb from the ghetto. A line drawn by old hands, by old power. It is a chemical line – a line which follows the needle of the syringe and sets the course of a fleeting transit… from here to a certain heaven. It is also a human line - one which strikes through the same desperate search for connection, for peace, belonging, wholeness. The same human ache that haunts the ghetto as it haunts the suburb. 

The children of the light and the children of the dark. A binary imposed through colonial rule and affirmed through the imposition of a religion that assured us of its universal applications at every turn. With this, we are inheritors of the myth that light is pure knowledge and the dark is mere absence. Let us question that. Let us consider that the dark might not be void, but instead a fertile ground. We will consider the soil in the dark forest where the image develops… the viscous resolve of the ink pooling on our screen. The night that is pregnant with our dreams and the conspiracies of our ancestors. The dark that contains its own heaven for those of us who seek it. 

And what of the light? 

Is it always the truth? When it blinds or interrogates us… when it sterilises us, who is the one wielding it? What does it subdue with its glare?  While the harsh sun of the afternoon reveals every crack, do we not seek the shadow for rest?

This confluence thinks through the colonial project’s theological bait-and-switch which weaponised the promise of heavenly salvation to enforce earthly subjugation. This ideological machinery posited that the brutal reality of slavery and exploitation was not just compatible with the Christian duty, but that for the slave to endure the ‘civilising’ violence of the plantation is to allow herself to be purified for eternal salvation. We saw this sick and perverted logic embodied by the plantation priest in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1976 film La Última Cena when he delivered his sermon to the slaves. With tears in his eyes, the priest instructed the slaves that their suffering is in fact a divine gift, a sacred cross to bear which wins them favour with God. The plantation priest experiences his glory in this life, and assures the slave that their glory is reserved for the afterlife and that this suffering is merely the price of admission.

Heaven comes after death and in exchange for hell in the present. This inanity was opposed categorically through the emergence of fugitive spaces–Quilombos, Palenques, Cimarronajes are a plain and utter rejection of this ideal and a material gesture towards the age-old belief that "heaven" can be recognized or created here and now through knowledge, conspiracy and resistance. They stand as an anathema to Christianity moulded to serve the needs of empire and as a site to build the power of the enslaved and colonized. 

They refused to be passive recipients of a delayed reward and transformed themselves into active agents of their own immediate political, cultural, material salvation. 

To study and to create therefore within this tradition is to like-wise engage in an act of “heaven-making”, or to ask of ourselves that if there is in fact a thin line between heaven and here, how can we find it?

Wednesday 21st

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

• Introducing Santiago Calderon and silk screen printing

Afternoon (14:30 – 19:00)

• Silk Screen workshop
• Pre-film screening reading led by Anahi Saravia Herrera and Fagner Lima
• Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa - On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization
• Sociologia do negro Brasileiro by Clovis Moura

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

• Emulsion in Forest
• Film Screening: La Nación Clandestina

Thursday 22nd

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

• Silk Screen Printing workshop continued with Santi

Afternoon (14:30 – 19:00)

• Silk Screen workshop and creating alongside reading dictated from:² 
• Marimba Ani - Religion and Ideology
• “The Monotheistic Ideal; Incipient European Cultural Chauvinism”
• “Christianity, colonialism and cultural imperialism: “Heathen”, “Native”, and “Primitive”.
• Light in the dark by Gloria Anzaldua

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

• Film Screening: ÔRÍ by Raquel Gerber (On Beatriz Nascimento)

Friday 22nd

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

• Farewell to Santi and final references
• Discussion on film screening of ÔRÍ

Afternoon (14:30 – 20:00)

• Group activity on “La Isla que se Repite” (The island that repeats), Antonio Benítez Rojo
• How to work and think cross-geographically
• Screen printing

^{1 "Carrying torches to light their way, the leaders of the revolt met in an open space in the thick forests of the Morne Rouge, a mountain overlooking Le Cap . . . That very night they began. Each slave gang murdered its masters and burnt the plantation to the ground . . . in a few days one half of the famous North Plain was a flaming ruin. From Le Cap the whole horizon was a wall of fire. From this wall continually rose thick black volumes of smoke, through which came tongues of flame leaping to the very sky. For nearly three days the people of Le Cap could barely distinguish day from night, while a rain of burning cane straw, driven before the wind like flakes of snow, flew over the city and the shipping in the harbour, threatening both with destruction.” James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Vintage Books.} 

^{2 This proposal is inspired by the readings in Cuban cigar factories, which began in the 19th century, where a person would read newspapers and books of all genres to the artisans while they rolled cigars.}

Seminar 1: 25 - 27 November 2025

Deserve got nothin to do with it

A glossary for our introductory confluence:

Deserve

Accuser

Native

Lament

Sacrifice

Terrorist

Spect_acting

Groundings

In the Christian bible, the book of Job confronts us with arguably its most morally challenging treatise on the question of human suffering. It begins in God’s heavenly court and depicts a scene in which God, sat upon the throne, is visited by his officers one after another. Among these officers is the one which we have come to know as ‘Satan’. It bears noting however that in the ancient Hebrew script in which the Old Testament was written, ‘Satan’ was written a definite article and the language did not have capital letters — thus, what we have come to know as a proper noun: ‘Satan’ [שָׂטָן], was in fact not a proper name but a title: ‘hassatan’ [הַשָּׂטָן] — ‘the satan’ or the adversary/accuser. (Biermann, Joel. “The Devil in the Details of the Old Testament: Is Satan in the Hebrew Bible?” *1517*, 1517 Fund, 27 Oct. 2021, www.1517.org/articles/the-devil-in-the-details-of-the-old-testament-is-satan-in-the-hebrew-bible. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.)

As ‘the satan’ approached the throne, God called out to the satan and boasted to him about his servant Job, the most righteous and perfect of all his children. It was all the satan could do to fulfill his role as the adversary:

“Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” 

And the Lord said to Satan, 

“Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand.” 

So [the] [s]atan went out from the presence of the Lord. (Job 1:6-12)

This wager, which was initiated by God and executed by his officer, fundamentally severs any link between human suffering and moral consequence. It makes it abundantly clear that the torment which is to be wrought upon Job is not a result of his failings, but simply a test of his virtue. It is an assertion that the machinery of the heavenly cosmos operates on a logic which exists entirely outside of our own notions of what is just and right on this earth. As we visit the righteous laments of Job from the ashes of his destruction, let us allow ourselves a few questions… first and foremost, does deserve have anything to do with it?

………..

We will begin our COOP study group with an exploration of words and ideas. Words that we know, words we have borrowed, words we have invented, words we might take for granted. We will explore our ideas. Ideas we might share, ideas we would like to understand better, ideas that might oppose one another, ideas that are working on us. 

We will study and we will create.

Tuesday 25th:

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

• Introductions and lamentations

• Discussion of COOP expectations

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

• Slow reading Walter Rodney - Groundings with my brothers (and sisters)

• This session will weave through a few different texts which will serve as the basis of the pedagogical approach we will take as a coop. We will begin with a foundational work by Walter Rodney from which the Undercommons of Moten and Harney and by extension, Ground Provisions of Tonika Seale Thompson and Stefano Harney derive.
• Light in the Dark by Gloria Anzaldua

• Introducing the Book of Job

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

• Film Screening: The Last Supper (1976) 

Wednesday 26th: 

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

This second day of our gathering will continue to engage with the book of job and the answers it attempts to give us on the question of suffering. We will also then depart to other religious traditions to engage understanding of suffering that have emerged against our entirely outside of the judeo-christian understanding. What does deserve have to do with it? 

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

• Assata Shakur and her adversaries
• Islam and Christianity in the black liberation movement 

“Assata Shakur is now a Muslim. Well, she didn’t actually convert to Islam. But in the eyes of the United States government where “terrorism” and threats to the state have become synonymous with Islam and Muslims, the recent placement of Assata Shakur on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist List”, has for all intents and purposes, made her one.” - Sohail Daulatzai (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/5/9/are-we-all-muslim-now-assata-shakur-and-the-terrordome)

• Listening session

• Malcolm X - Message to the Grass Roots

• Nas - Illmatic

• Afeni, Assata, Tupac Shakur

Evening (20:00 – 22:00)

• Film Screening or the watching of a theatre play? Something that can be re-enacted

Thursday 27th:

Morning (10:30 – 13:00)

• Site visit TBD

Afternoon (14:00 – 19:00)

• Collaborative writing exercise - re-interpreting the play