Paper short abstract:

I explore the creation of an Indigenous / Afro collaborative performance as a form of speculative anti-dystopian practice, one where the encounter between subaltern trajectories shapes a path to gradual decolonization.

Paper long abstract:

What if an Afro and an Indigenous woman met in the early morning as electric technicians hired by a small city in Argentina's Buenos Aires province in a dystopian future to install street sensors that measure viruses in the atmosphere? What if, during this work, the women narrated their life stories and, through that act, decided to take the Argentine state to trial? This is the scenario that the script by Alejandra Egido, an Afro-Latin American theatre director, builds in a recent play. The result of a collaborative ethnography we initiated between the Afro theatre of Egido and the Mapuche theatre of Miriam Alvarez and Lorena Cañuqueo, the play speculates on Afro-Indigenous encounters. Currently, these relationships have been widely overlooked (with important exceptions Wade 2005, Hooker 2020, Lethabo King 2019). Following Saidiya Hartman (2020), speculation becomes a path of reconstructing relationalities, of exploring the subversive potential of its conjoining. Speculation becomes a form of intervention over a dystopian outcome of environmental and health crisis, which as Zoe Todd identified, is for colonised peoples a form of describing the past and existence in the present (Davis and Todd 2017). In this encounter Afro and Mapuche women are already survivors. They are already building an anti-dystopian world that challenges colonisation, not by a decolonial inversion, but by every means of techno-scientific re-appropriation, taking the state to trial and re-shaping intimacy.