Living Decoloniality, practical examples of decolonial
re-existence through the aid sector, a podcast by Carla Vitantonio with the support of the Centre for humanitarian leadership.
 

Welcome back to Living Decoloniality. I am Carla Vitantonio and the sounds and noises you hear in the background
are from the city where I live and work, Havana, Cuba.
This is the last episode of the third season, and I have with me from Berlin,
the person who has been supporting the production of this podcast almost since the beginning. Matilde Dani, hello Matilde!
 

Hello, Carla! It’s a pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to reflect together on this season after hearing everyone’s voices and stories.
This season of Living Decoloniality, like the previous ones, has been incredibly meaningful for me, especially as a learning process.
And I think this season, in particular, has given me an understanding of how deeply  Coloniality shapes the ways we think, work and interact, often in ways we are not even aware of.
Matilde and I had originally organized 10 episodes for this season. In our plan, the last episode would be a sort of experiment of extrapolation.
We would share with our listeners the thoughts and practices from this season that had guided us the most through these months, and perhaps an example of how we had used what we learned in our daily practices.
However, Living Decoloniality does not happen in a vacuum.
We are lucky enough because this podcast exists based on our voluntary work and on the skills study, knowledge and expertise that we accumulate with time.
We are lucky because also all our guests are joining Living Decoloniality moved by the personal reasons, and one of these reasons is the hope that talking about practices of decoloniality will inspire new people and help to make this movement bigger and stronger.
Finally, we are also very lucky because we can count on the Centre for humanitarian leadership which keeps trusting us. However, the word today is not the same one where we lived when Living Decoloniality started.
Besides the tragedies of Gaza, Sudan, Congo and the many others, too many to be put in a list, today we have to face the disappearance of one of the biggest and most powerful international donors for our sector.
This is drastically reshaping our environment, and many of the changes are not for us to see yet.
Every change can be an opportunity, and Matilde and I hope that this new geography will help the aid sector to make a stronger move towards decolonization.
Meanwhile, though, what we feel and perceive is uncertainty, sadness, concern and even fear.
For Living Decoloniality, this sudden event meant, in the immediate, having to cancel one of our episodes as our guest was someone whose life has been tragically affected by the recent events, and felt that this was not the right moment for them to speak.
For this reason, today we close the season with our final thoughts and an attempt to extrapolate each one in our own way from what we collected through this journey.
First of all, I would like Matilde to share some of our considerations. Matilde.
So, what did I admire about this season?
I think one themes I found recurring was the tension between the language we use and the change we seek.
We often talk about shifting power, changing dynamics, but the structures and technology we rely on still reinforce colonial hierarchies.
Ammaarah, in episode 6, pointed this out, so language has been used and continues to be used as a form of oppression.
So I think it is important to emphasize that if we really want to decolonize, we have to question not only the structures around us, but also our own ways of thinking.
Who can create knowledge? Whose voices are prioritized? And how do we ensure that we are not just replacing one dominant perspective with another?
Another important reflection I will treasure relates to co-creation mentioned by Dawit in episode 2.
Decolonization is not about stepping aside and letting others take over, but actively building spaces where different perspectives can coexist and shape new ways of doing things.
What does this actually mean? Abandoning extractive and paternalistic approaches and moving towards true collaboration.
We must recognize the value of local knowledge, its essentiality and we must highlight that when we refer to local knowledge, we are talking about non Eurocentric ones.
The most sustainable and effective solution come from those who experience colonization first hand, who suffer its consequences and who have the deepest knowledge of what real change looks like.
This means focusing on localization, it means opening ourselves up to difficult conversation, but above all, as Safieh pointed out in episode 4, we must arm ourselves with compassion, kindness and curiosity.
I think these three final aspects are the ones that will stick with me the most and I will try to translate them into my practice.
In trying to find this battle against a colonized system, we forget to be compassionate, kind and curious towards the different.
As for myself, one of the things that pleasantly surprised me is how the topic of this podcast resonates from one sector to the other.
I thought, I was especially talking to practitioners and policymakers in the humanitarian and development sectors, but I have been reached by people working in security in research, in governance and have told me how helpful some of the practices we mentioned have been for them.
This should not be surprising, in fact, colonality permeates our life and environment with no exception and certain practices can be easily adapted from one sector to another.
A second thought that I matured during this season is about intersectionality.
I understand, I think, I think that we all do how difficult it is to look at colonality from an intersectional perspective.
I understand how comfortable the temptation to use binary categories is.
I understand that we have almost naturalized the idea of a world built upon binaries, good and bad, white and black, developed and undeveloped, civilized and primitive, male and female.
But we need to make an effort and to see once again that binaries are a simplification.
And ultimately, very often binary categories replicates the gaze of the colonizer, the white man who divides the world in what is like him, therefore good and what is different.
I understand the challenge of introducing intersectionality in our daily practices and reflection, but if we don’t do that, we risk missing important details and ultimately doing harm.
A further reflection emerged when I recalled the process that I put in place and that I use with my guests before recording.
Those three questions that have always been the backbone of the podcast have gained a deeper meaning with time.
When I ask people to introduce themselves, the response that I get is increasingly going to a quite articulated positionality statement.
Though I never explicitly ask for it, I realize this is what I wanted. I want people to tell me where they are talking from.
I don’t believe that some are more legitimated than others when we talk about coloniality, but I firmly believe that declaring our partiality, our locus of enunciation is the only way we have to be accountable and to guarantee our truth and honesty.
And I go in the same direction of what I was saying a few minutes ago, the complexity of our vulnerabilities and privileges builds our point of observation and enunciation.
One might decide that it’s not worth spending several minutes describing it, but I do believe that in this very precise historical moment, making a positionality statement can be an act of courage and it is part of our practice of Do no harm.
When I ask people where they met coloniality or what is coloniality for them, I am not simply asking for a definition and in fact every answer is different also because of the positionality I just mentioned.
The more my guests ask themselves the what coloniality means in their life, the clearer this definition resonate and the easier the link with the last question.
And finally the third question, this is perhaps the real trademark of this podcast.
I started living decoloniality because while I was listening to a lot of critical voices denouncing the coloniality of our sector, very few were proposing concrete alternatives.
Many of those alternatives remained vague thoughts that did not find concrete paths in real life.
But I knew that the world is full of people and groups who are already bringing change in their life.
This was the push I was looking for. I learned most of what I know in my life from others.
In this season I could see that having such three questions, well framed and clarified was a powerful tool to bring my guest to show day-er power and agency.
You may ask why I decided to use this episode to talk about this podcast as a process and the answer is easy.
Decoloniality is not only about saying different things, it is also about making things differently, creating alternative processes, experimenting other ways that are closer to the way we feel and we want to stand in this world.
Finally, I wanted living decoloniality to be a learning opportunity for myself and others, but also a place for hope.
Today many things have changed and the movement that wants to decolonize our sector is bigger, more diversified and stronger.
Still, one of the strongest ask is how, how can we accompany our organizations in this route?
How can we trigger change? Living decoloniality is increasingly becoming that toolbox I had dreamt of three years ago, where people can go and search for inspiration.
And with this I say, until the next time.
You listened to living decoloniality, practical examples of decolonial re-existence through the aid sector.
 

I am Carla Vitantonio and you can reach me through my Spotify and Spreaker channels or through my Instagram Carla Vitantonio.
This podcast was deliberately recorded with minimum technical equipment trying to preserve as much as possible the feelings and intentions of those who participated.
If you liked it, please subscribe and share it through your network.
Living the coloniality was produced in partnership with the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership.
The logo is a present from Eugenio Nittolo