Azul (Carolina) Duque

Azul (Carolina) Duque has built a practice out of disciplines that are rarely found in the same room. Sound and somatic work, clowning and aikido, decolonial scholarship and death doula practice, artistic curation and academic research into the political ecology of our times Each one is a different apprenticeship in the same thing: how to stay present with what is difficult and composting our denias into more fertile ground.

Azul has lived and worked in Beirut, Aotearoa New Zealand, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Brazil including the Amazon. As a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, she worked with Teia das 5 Curas, a research and education network of Indigenous educators and knowledge keepers from Brazil, Canada, and Peru, including the Fulni-ô, Huni Kui, Pataxó, Pitaguary, and Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú peoples, asking how we prepare for the collapse of modern structures while other possibilities of coexistence are gestated. Azul also curated Reactivating Exiled Capacities, an artistic residency where artists from different lineages sat with their denials around the polycrisis and then made somatic and metaphorical invitations from that ground.

She has also published on decolonial pedagogy and climate education, and collaborated on research into the political economy of extinction, tracing how conditions of financial subordination make extraction the price of stability for Global South governments, and how biodiversity loss, sovereign debt, and colonial legacy hold each other in place.

Her artistic attenttion bleeds into all of the work, opening states that language alone cannot reach. Azul's album [telurico] and her art collective sal-t.art are some places this practice takes material form.

Vanessa Reid has spent twenty-five years working at the intersection of systems transformation, cultural evolution, and the deep inner work that makes these possible. A writer, poet, and process architect, she goes toward the edges - complexity, collapse, crisis, dying - with rigour and reverence, and a deep trust in the wild, the mythic, and the invisible intelligence of living systems.

She has lived and worked across India, Guatemala, Jerusalem, Greece, and the Middle East, co-founding the Living Wholeness Institute during Greece's economic crisis and building translocal communities of practice. She is Faculty at the Wolf Willow Institute, where she designs depth pedagogies, rites of passage, and cross-cultural complexity immersions and is a senior designer with the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Shingwauk University.

Her practice is shaped by an unusual meeting of architecture, psychology and systems thinking. She holds a Master’s in Architecture from McGill University and a Master’s in Process-Oriented Psychology and Conflict Studies from Process Work Institute, and has been recognized as both an Aga Khan Foundation Fellow and a Bealight Fellow in Canada.

Vanessa is the former Executive Director of Santropol Roulant, one of the defining experiments of Canada's social innovation movement. As publisher of the award-winning ascent magazine, she pioneered the practice of Conscious Closure by bringing the publication through its full lifecycle to a close. She is currently bringing to life The Steadying - an earthwise response network for the metacrisis that weaves systemic risk awareness with practical, relational, and ecological preparedness - and writing The Wild Life of Dying. She aspires to be fierce company for anyone navigating the cycles of living and dying amidst the urgent, gorgeous mess of our times.

TEDx Talk: Conscious Closure and the Wild Life of Dying