Cecilia Vicuña: Decolonizing myself

At this point I have been trying to clarify my position as an artist, and why I work with certain ideas and themes. For me, it is still hard to grasp.
I was struggling for the last year in understanding how art relates to politics and the shift towards more research-based art in an academic sense. Suddenly I realize how far away I am from purely intellectual art. I needed to catch up, in order to understand what they were talking about. It exhausted me to the point I became paralyzed, and every idea seemed too small, not good enough, not political enough, not radical enough?
I started to question those structures and the role of art and politics, how can you resolve something with a rational answer and methods, if the rational was something that created the structures we find problematic? Isn’t it basically the same western frame of thinking which keeps repeating itself for too long? An if there any alternative?
Those questions kept appearing to me, not that I think those structures shouldn’t exist, they should, and I learn to understand them, but more about aren’t there something else missing, except rational understanding of things? Which might be deemed irrelevant, because of the logic we have inherited from the culture.
I see an act of exploring rituals, dreams, and intuition in the artistic practice as an act of decolonizing myself and allowing different sensibilities to speak out through me, could it be that body and mind can then finally come together? So far my mind is still detached from the body.
From the readings of Anthropocene, and understanding that just talking about the problem is not enough, as we see the situation with climate change - the information about it and fear only paralyzes a person who is unable to stop the process caused by deeper structures woven into the society oriented towards technological progress, competition and freedom within the market. I believe there should be something else, which might be unexpected.
"However, we can try to understand everything about how the past has shape us, but understanding is not reclaiming because it is not recovering. Indeed, this is the anguished question of David Abram, a question that we cannot avoid just by invoking capitalism or human greed: How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth?"

And reasoning doesn't help much, in my mind there should be a shift towards a more transpersonal ecological identity, the question is how do we train our sensibilities that were never used? How to shift from one paradigm to another?
At the same time, I think the practice should exist inside the permeable frame, otherwise it has a danger of becoming too far away and too detached from reality.

I feel very close to the words which Cecilia speaks, about awareness of everything, even the stones are aware. I love rewatching it.
For my project in Zyryanka, I collected stones on the river to weave them in my hair, to make a bodily connection, to feel the heaviness of the stone on my head. In my mind, I imagined how long they have been formed and the whole ritual was about weaving times together, the heaviness of the past which should be carried and faced.
I moved those stones from Zyryanka to Yakutsk and left them in a jar planning to take them as a souvenir to the Netherlands. But I was stopped the night before my flight, in my dream I was digging the land in order to find small stones in the middle of the night, I was hiding and doing it secretly, I find few small ones and tied them together, when suddenly sirens went off and I started to run, I knew I must run as something was approaching us, I saw people running in a rush, some of them carrying huge chunks of the stones, suddenly they started to attack each other, trying to steal the stones, it quickly becomes a mess, I threw my stones away in order not to be attacked by other people and I woke up with the thought that I must leave the stones in the region and not to take them away. I asked my mother to take care of them and explained to her my dream. She asked another person to take them back to the river in Zyryanka and let it go by saying some kind words to them.

I am still in the process of understanding and transitioning, it could be that I find something else, but so far this is my station.

Last night I woke up afraid - I had these dreams following me recently - in them I become trapped in another reality, which is very similar to ours, but physical forces are different. And my room has its features, even the same gaudy flowery wallpaper, I stand on it and my vision is very blurry, time moves so slowly, almost becomes material, it is very hard to move against it.
I move along the walls by touching everything around me, by the cold surface I realize that it is a mirror, but there is no reflection of me in there, I touch and touch it, trying to focus my eyes, there is still nothing. I realize I could be trapped here all my life, in such a small space, if I don’t wake up, I beg myself to wake up and I do.
After waking up I had a thought, if you go down too far and too deep, will you be able to come back?