BINATIONAL ARTISTIC PhD-PROGRAM

Seismic Dreaming: Collective Repair, More-than-Human Reciprocity, and the Potentials of the Common investigates dreaming as a relational field of knowledge capable of unsettling modern ontological distinctions and contributing to processes of collective repair. The research proceeds from the premise that dreaming occupies a contested terrain within colonial history, where what counts as real, material, or human is continuously produced through coercive regimes of domination. It argues that the separability instituted by colonial-modern reason—organized through hierarchical and binary divisions—not only legitimizes material forms of extraction and exploitation, but also erodes capacities for reciprocity with other terrestrial intelligences while foreclosing the existence of a plurality of cosmologies. From this perspective, modernity can be understood as a project that interrupts the capacity to dream. Drawing on Amerindian cosmopolitics and countercolonial approaches, the oneiric field is understood as a relational practice through which bodies, territories, communities, and the Earth are continually entangled and transformed, shifting understandings of vitality and belonging and allowing other modes of perception, relation, and commoning to emerge. Situated at the intersection of artistic research, performance studies, decolonial studies, Mesoamerican Indigenous feminisms, Afro-diasporic, and Amerindian epistemologies, this research is grounded in trajectories traced between Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Oaxaca (Mexico). Across these territories, artistic-performative and community-based practices have made it possible to dwell with the impacts of necropolitics (Mbembe), opening space for transgressive vital experiences and expanded understandings of the relations between art, activism and spirituality.These trajectories extend through collaborative research engagements in Europe (to be further elaborated in the Research Process and Outcomes sections). Within this framework, the PhD asks how countercolonial practices forged across the Global South might contribute to transterritorial alliances and collaborative knowledge production in the Global North, and under what conditions such encounters can remain accountable to the cosmologies, positionalities, and situated histories from which these practices emerge. In dialogue with authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Dènètem Touam Bona, Lorena Cabnal, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Donna Haraway, Leda Maria Martins, Suely Rolnik and Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, the project develops an inquiry into how dreaming might operate as a site for reconfiguring relationalities, expanding understandings of reality, and repairing vital fabrics affected by colonial violence. The research thus asks whether dreaming might operate as a decolonial practice, capable of displacing the regimes of separation that sustain modernity and reopening our participation in the webs that constitute inseparable bonds of vitality—the indissoluble chain of existences that connects distinct dimensions of time-space and human and more-than-human, living and dead existences (Martins). The investigation unfolds through three interconnected axes of inquiry: Body–Territory: Repair and Crossroads, which explores the relationship between dreaming, territoriality, and collective resistance ; Body–Earth: Reciprocity and Metamorphosis, which examines dreaming as a practice of attunement to more-than-human forms of life and terrestrial intelligences; and Body–Community: Radical Imagination and the Potentials of the Common, which investigates dreaming as a collective practice capable of activating critical fabulation, radical imagination, and alternative horizons of world-making. The three axes of inquiry outlined above are intended to unfold through interconnected processes articulated by artistic practice. They are grounded in performative experimentations, artistic-pedagogical propositions, and collective cartographic processes, which will be further detailed in the Methodology section. Drawing on the notions of vitality (Cabnal, Martins), the vibratile body (Rolnik), and oneiric practices (Bona, Ferreira da Silva), the project seeks to follow how dream experiences traverse bodies, multispecies alliances, territories, artistic practices, and collective processes, generating modes of radical imagination and activating transgressive vitalities across relational fields of collective repair.