Kim Darbouze

Kim Darbouze is psycho-social researcher, weaver, and dancer who sutures the material, ecological, and artistic embodied impacts colonialism made disjunctive. My work digs deeper into the hidden ways in which colonialism continues to haunt, embed, evolve, and erode unity, healing, past, present, and futures. I show how colonialism extracts from and harms us all (human and non human species). Colonialism thrives in murkiness and 'neo' evolutions that continue to justify killability and extraction for capital commodity. I aim to bring the murky to light in an accessible, poetic, and storytelling manner that invites collaboration to build upon this work further. Using weaving, embodied knowledge, ecologies, Indigenous knowledge and the existing work of the many who have been challenging colonialism for decades, to a sober way of seeing colonialism. This approach enriches my ability to portray colonialism beyond a matter of land theft. My work highlights the deeply intertwined the connections between Land, species, ecologies, bodies, memory, and embodied trauma that takes shape long after trauma, wounding, erasures, and violence. The work focuses on harvesting healing futures while repairing the ruptures that such extractions and violence creates for lifetimes. Using my psychology background in harmony with anthropology and arts, I seek therapeutic forms of healing that are tied to needs of local communities and their memory. Psychology remains complicit in overlooking geopolitical, ecological, and embodied traumas that persist for demographics who are resource rich. I implement a somatic and suturing approach that is collective, accessible, and taps into more than individualistic and specific social issues. I find the psychology/psychiatry continues to implicate issues without find ways to absolve them or make them an individual matter. It does not want to connect the dots of colonialism. Colonial intentionally frays, erases, and reduces these deeply woven ties. From the air we breathe to clothing wear, colonialism is all around us and flowing through oceans creating these global ruptures. As the pharcyde reminds us, we can't keep running away. We must face it and find ways to heal through Indigenous knowledge and ways of being. We continue to look away even as the world is on fire. What will therapy do for the few when the many are being eroded and compromised?