Many of us* live in fragmentation from ourselves, our communities, our histories and the environment—shaped in big and small ways, across public and private life, through historical forces and present-day economic and social pressures. One of the most significant manifestations of this fragmentation is how we come to treat knowledge of our worlds as something alien to us, and that must be granted by an external authority in order to feel valid.

In Paulo Freire’s thinking about this matter, he describes two opposing models of education. In the ‘banking model’ there is always two separate categories of learner and authority figure; learners are treated as containers into which knowledge is deposited by authority figures, and conformity is prized. In contrast, in the ‘problem-posing model’, both teacher and learner identify a problem which both parties face together. Knowledge here is something produced through dialogue and relationship: co-investigated, co-created, and lived.

I understand the banking model as a core expression of coloniality, a product not only of imperial conquest, but also of other forms of domination (interpersonal, institutional, and cultural) that condition us to distrust and denigrate our own ways of knowing and to defer to external validation.

Colonisation, once enacted, cannot be undone. Some ruptures remain. But we can make new justices. We can cultivate alternative ways of relating to ourselves, to each other, to history, and to the environment… what I think of as sweet medicines: life-affirming practices of knowing, drawn from the past, from where we are, and from elsewhere.

My work here in Studio Styles is to produce these sweet medicines for social healing. This work is part of a shared labour carried across time by those who have thought, built, and cared before me, and those who will continue after.