The Practice of Re-storying
Re-storying is the methodological practice through which La Escuela de las Chullachaquis engages with the Iquitos Territory. The practice begins from the understanding that extractivism is sustained not only through infrastructures, economies, and institutions, but also through stories: stories about what land is, who it is for, what counts as progress for territories, and which forms of life matter.
To re-story in Iquitos meant loosening the grip of those narratives and making space for others to be cultivated.
Stories that World
Stories are tools for describing reality and helping us make sense of the world. But they are also much, much more than that. They are worldmaking (and worlding) forces that organize what becomes thinkable: who counts as fully human, what can be treated as a resource, or which futures are imaginable and worth building toward.
If stories shape worlds, it is because humans are themselves story-shaped beings. Learning from Sylvia Wynter, we understand ourselves as more than biological: we are both flesh and story, homo narrans. Our biology gives rise to stories, and our stories, in turn, act viscerally upon our biology through neurological, somatic, and biochemical processes. We feel this every day. We become anxious working under stories of capitalist productivity. We become sick breathing the polluted air of industrial stories of progress.
Stories do not grow out of thin air… They arise from specific lands, bodies, histories, and relations. Every story comes from somewhere and carries the marks of the worlds that produced it and that they produce. To understand stories as situated in bodies, temporalities and places is to recognize that no story is neutral, universal, or inevitable.
Stories are at the center of how we relate to one another, to the more-than-human world, and the Territory. Yet, in their inspiring action, in their generation of relations, and in their guidance of the future, not all stories bring us into relation in the same way. Some constrict our capacity for collaborative survival, while others expand our vitality for generative, accountable, and reciprocal life.
Re-storying begins in this messy middle of many competing, conflicting, complicit stories. It starts by noticing which stories have tightened around us and learning how to loosen their grip.
Re-storying as Practice
We practice re-storying as a process, a method, a form of relation, that allows us to sit with painful and harmful narratives, notice where they bind, and rehearse gestures of transformation that steer us to more reciprocal, caring, and loving relations with one other and the more-than-human world.
Re-storying is not a technique, nor uses one technique. It is not limited to writing, listening, speaking, or narrative analysis. Re-storying can unfold through ritual, dancing, swimming, walking, dreaming, and many other forms of embodied and collective encounter.
In La Escuela de las Chullachaquis, re-storying became a way of engaging with the Territory through multiple artistic and pedagogical practices. The school's approach to re-storying comes from a specific attunement to how extractivism's stories take hold in Iquitos, and to how we might learn to slip through their cracks and uplift alternative stories driven by relationality.
Across the school, re-storying unfolded through five interwoven orientations that shaped how we listened, sensed, refused, imagined, and moved with the world. These orientations are not universal. They respond to the specificity of the work we did and do at La Escuela de las Chullachaquis.
Five Orientations for Re-storying
Re-storying begins from the understanding that stories emerge through relation. They are not created by isolated bodies! Stories can only happen through encounters between people, places, temporalities, and matters. This is why, to re-story is to enter into accountable relation with the many presences already participating in storyworlds and worldmaking.
As a relational invitation, re-storying seeks to decenter human supremacy by recognizing that humans are not the sole authors of stories. The practice asks us to cultivate the attunement needed to perceive the signals, presences, and forms of storytelling carried by the Territory. This supports the creation of conditions for otherwise stories, often suppressed under colonial and capitalist orders, to gain impulse, come into being, and take deeper root.
But relation alone is not enough... Re-storying requires relational ethics. Without them, the practice risks reproducing extractive habits: capturing stories as data, treating them as cultural resources, or severing them from the relations that give them life.
To practice re-storying relationally is therefore to learn to listen differently, attending to the stories carried by land, water, bodies, and more-than-human beings with responsibility, reciprocity, and care.