Methodological and Epistemic Possibilities of Decay: Relational World-Making

Abstract

This paper examines the artistic-scientific practice of Uýra Sodoma, an Indigenous, trans*, and non-binary artist and biologist from Manaus, Brazil, whose performances and installations mobilize the onto-epistemic possibilities that emerge at the entanglements of decay and resurgence. In her long-term artistic research project Resurgences, Uýra engages with ecosystems that have been devastated by extractivism, colonization, and erasure. She conceptualizes artistic practice as an ethical mode of response, through which the stories of plants, animals, rivers, and other non-human entities can be articulated via embodied listening. These stories do not merely resist colonial narratives; rather, they activate alternative ontologies of care, resistance, and becoming-with that confront environmental injustice and epistemic violence. Performance thus becomes a space of world-making, where silenced histories and ecological memories return, and where bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions intertwine.

Through performance, photography, and ritual gesture, Uýra enacts what may be described as relational entanglements, in which decay is understood not as a rigid or closed state, but as a process that carries the potentiality of transformation, transition, and becoming-with. By conceiving Uýra’s practice as a site of entanglement, in which knowledge, time, space, and bodies are co-constitutively enacted, this paper investigates how her performances mobilize a relational, non-anthropocentric ethics of decay. A close examination of these practices reveals their capacity to reframe decay not as an end, but as a process of renewal, re-membering, and regeneration. The analysis asks how the circulation of memory and history is enabled through Uýra’s artistic practices and what methodological and epistemological possibilities emerge from the processes of decay embedded within them. Finally, this paper calls for an interdisciplinary dialogue with decolonial, Indigenous, queer, and trans* epistemologies, underscoring the pivotal role of art as a site of world-making in the face of global ecological and political crises.