My name is Leon, I am 32 years old, and beetroot leaves me rather indifferent. Its omnipresence feels like too much, and a healthier relationship would mean less. This is something I would also like to invite into my own life: less of everything, less luxury, more compost toilets; more connection with what surrounds us, and less escaping into global structures. This is not about withdrawing from our entanglement—and therefore complicity—in multiple forms of injustice and violence toward the human and more-than-human world. Rather, it is about raising questions:
How can we build locally resilient structures that provide a region with what is truly needed—if that is even possible? What is “needed”, and who gets to decide that?
What does this entanglement and complicity consist of, and how can we hold it emotionally without looking away? How can the nature that surrounds us not become history—and how can stories help create a life-centered connection rather than an anthropocentric one?
In short: I am interested in coloniality and the striving toward decolonial structures, and thus toward post-capitalist and non-patriarchal ways of living. I am interested in myths and stories, and in the power of oral culture in contrast to natural-scientific dominance. I am interested in the dissolving of dualisms and fixed spectrums, in connection with nature, in the courage to speak what moves us, and in humility toward what is, what was, and what will always be.