What catalyzed the School?
Extractivism is often understood as the removal of resources from the earth, such as oil, minerals, timber, and more. But extractivism is more than that. It is also a story, sustained by many stories, that teaches us to see the Territory as property, forests as inventory, rivers as infrastructure, and human and more-than-human life as resources.
Stories do not merely describe the world, they also shape it… and extractivism as a story produces a world where relations of care, reciprocity, interdependence, and responsibility are displaced by narratives that privilege individualism, accumulation, efficiency, and domination. All of them organize how institutions govern, how economies expand, and how humans come to understand what land is for, and what and who is valuable within it.
Over time, the story of extractivism has come to be treated as common sense, often positioned as the only and inevitable path toward economic development. In doing so, it occupies more than territory. It occupies our imagination, relations, and the possibilities for existing differently.
If extractive worlds are sustained by stories, then resisting them requires not only opposing their physical infrastructure but also their narrative and affective dimensions. This means cultivating new habits of perception and ways of relating, sensing, telling, gathering, and inhabiting life-affirming stories that are already here or about to come.
It is within this opening that La Escuela de las Chullachaquis emerges.
What is La Escuela de las Chullachaquis?
La Escuela de las Chullachaquis is an artistic and pedagogical proposition dedicated to exploring and re-storying the narratives that sustain extractive worlds.
Inspired by the Chullachaqui, the Amazonian shapeshifting being who, by moving between forms, re-stories what appears fixed, the school approaches re-storying as a speculative practice of learning to relate and inhabit the Territory otherwise. The Chullachaqui reminds us that reality is not settled, and that other ways of being can be rehearsed.
The school first happened in Iquitos, a city in the Peruvian Amazon shaped by long colonial histories of extraction. Its inaugural iteration was developed in collaboration with feminist activists living in the city, grounding the school's methodologies in their territorial struggles and experiences.
While rooted in those relations and place, the school continues beyond its first iteration as an evolving pedagogical framework for collective inquiry, artistic experimentation, and relational worldmaking.
This website carries the school forward beyond the original gathering. It functions as a pedagogical tool and a space of rehearsal: a place for artists, educators, organizers, and communities to engage with the school's practices and adapt them within their own contexts of struggle, care, and collective imagination.
How we re-story extractivism?
At the heart of the school is the practice of re-storying.
Re-storying begins with the understanding that dominant narratives are more than explanations of the world; they help organize which worlds become possible. To re-story is to loosen those narratives and rehearse other ways of sensing, relating, and living with the Territory.
Through artistic, embodied, affective, and place-based methodologies, the school creates encounters in which participants can engage with the Territory as a reciprocal and caring relation, rather than as a backdrop or a source of resources.
As much as we often desire, these practices do not offer solutions. They create spaces for experimenting with the already-here and the not-yet: for dealing with our complicities, for sensing relational possibilities, practicing affective alliances, and cultivating forms of attention and attachment that can sustain broader ecologies of resistance and re-existence for the flourishing of human and more-than-human life.
What guides the School's encounters?
La Escuela de las Chullachaquis is guided by propositions, which are open invitations that shape the conditions for how we gather. Without determining what must happen, they create structure while leaving room for joy, emergence, responsiveness, and experimentation.
The school is guided by four core propositions:
Gather Otherwise
To come together differently through artistic and pedagogical gestures that open space for relational ways of sensing and being together.
Energize What Needs to Be
To attune to the latent possibilities, urgencies, and collective capacities already present within a group and its surroundings.
Engage in Tender Play
To approach the magnitude of extractive violence through speculative, careful, and joyful experimentation that allows other worlds to be rehearsed.
Practice Refusal of Any Kind
To cultivate small and large acts of refusal against extractive logics, while opening space for what else might become possible.
Together, these propositions shape the school as a space of rehearsal: a place to practice living otherwise in the midst of extractive worlds.