“The point of life and death is to prepare people to become good elders and good ancestors.” Vanessa Andreotti
E156 – Vanessa Andreotti on Radical Tenderness, Eldership and Decolonisation
Embracing Our Pain
Listen to the conversation:
If you love the show, you can subscribe through iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify and listen offline on your favourite device. Podcasts are great for long drives and commuting!
About this interview:
How do we live and die well?
“The point of life and death is to prepare people to become good elders and good ancestors.” Vanessa Andreotti
In this episode Amisha speaks with Vanessa Andreotti, a Brazilian educator and Indigenous and land rights activist. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. She is one of the founders of the ‘Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective’ and part of the co-ordination team of the “Last Warning” campaign. Vanessa is also the author of ‘Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism’.
Amisha and Vanessa explore what it means to live and die well in systems of dominant cultures. They share that we have developed limited capacities to face our mortality and to hold pain, hence are ill equipped to weather the storms of climate catastrophe, the rise in violence and the global mental health crisis.
Vanessa believes that the point of life and death is to prepare people to become good elders and good ancestors. They talk about the value of elders in our communities and the importance of their life’s teachings to be passed around so we can connect with generative ways of being that activates responsibility beyond ourselves. Vanessa reveals that we have to find balance and connection, we need to break codes of worthiness, behaviours of consumption and numbing pain in order to live considerate and fulfilled lives within the bigger metabolisms where we belong.
We learn that collective pain we are experiencing needs to be held by collectivised hearts. Seeing ourselves as a continuum of life, letting go of aspirations, idealisations and projections and activating our senses and sensibilities allows us to move beyond conditioning into relationships and responsibilities beyond ourselves. In turn this brings us closer to living in radical tenderness and balance with each other and the more than human world.
“You can’t live well, if we don’t know how to die well.” ~Vanessa Andreotti
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, a Brazilian educator and Indigenous and Land Rights advocate. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. Drawing on her mixed family history and the work of her arts/research/ecology collective, Vanessa invites us to develop the stamina to face difficult and painful things together with more maturity, sobriety, discernment and accountability, and to learn to activate senses and sensibilities that have been exiled by modernity and that can help us to sense, relate and imagine otherwise.
She is one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and part of the co-ordination team of the “Last Warning” campaign. Vanessa is also the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism.
To connect or work with Vanessa, decolonialfutures.net
To connect or work with Amisha, visit amisha.co.uk
artwork: Ismail Zaidy
Resources and links from this episode:
- Vanessa Andreotti LinkedIn account
- ‘Co-sensing radical tenderness’
- Dani d’Emilia . Artist, Queer activist
- John Crier
- Realisation Festival
From Me to We Find out more about our latest learning journey here.
Connect more with us:
- Beautiful Leadership mentoring
- Amisha’s One-to-One sessions
- Amisha’s book – INTUITION
- all that we are membership
←Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode →
You must be logged in to post a comment.