Kakáw Kóhic Dékalé

SUNSET DESTRUCTION ✷ DISRUPTIVE FUTURES

Kakáw Kóhic Dékalé are Ishakkoy and Kouri Vini words which, together, translate to “sunset destruction”. While the sunset may be understood as the end of a present, it can also welcomed as a harbinger of the future. Kakáw Kóhic Dékalé is a transdisciplinary project that imagines and rehearses utopic, multispecies futures through participatory performance, speculative design, and the Indigenous-led cosmological framework of the Fyrthyr Star.

The project activates sites of ecological and cultural restoration where Indigenous and allied communities come together to co-create refugia, or sanctuaries for human and non-human life. Kakáw Kóhic Dékalé challenges colonial and anthropocentric legal systems by offering alternative governance models based on relational ethics, ecological justice, and interspecies kinship. It is a ritual architecture which disrupts the imperial ceremony of segmenting the horizon as it calls for the destruction of imperial understandings of futuring.

The project invites collaboration from other artists, performers, designers, and dreamers for the adaptive reuse of ecologically significant locations such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the Arnold Arboretum in “Boston” into transformative spaces of engagement for decolonial solidarity and multispecies jurisprudence.

  • The particpatory work of KKD, takes the form jurisgenerative play-based community gatherings, to discuss, plan, and role-play the logistics, aesthetics, and everyday life events of a speculative siege on Vatican grounds by a Planetary Indigenous Solidarity Force.

    The Vatican was chosen as a site for a global reworking of law and grounds to advocate for Multispecies Jurisprudence because its history has left it, (through the influence of Doctrine of Discovery) and its many dioceses the largest reported land holding entity in the world. This project advances a platform for alternative claim making for united Indigenous communities (and their children in particular) to advance matters of sovereignty, solidarity, and sentience.

    Through the gathering of diverse Indigenous community, speculative play, and making art together we can not only rehearse for the liberated lives for we desire, but also generate an archive in the artwork from which future Indigenous children may continue to develop and defend a radical imagining beyond the settler colonial agenda (informed not only by political and educational media, but from memory and practice of relation and concatenation of cosmology).

  • What is your Preferred Dystopia?

    We’re told dystopia is collapse, despair, the end of everything. But what if dystopia is fertile ground? A place to compost the failed promises of the present and imagine alternatives that resist control, reimagine relation, and embrace the chimeric?

    Preferred Dystopias is an invitation to artists, thinkers, and makers to explore collapse as creative opportunity. What grows in the ruins? How do we live, love, and create in a world where progress failed us—but imagination hasn’t?

    I’m looking for work that:

    • Embraces hybridity (human/nonhuman, digital/organic, terrestrial/cosmic).

    • Negotiates with the dead while trusting the living.

    • Refuses the toxic optimism of “solutions” but builds hope through relation.

    • Asks what sovereignty looks like when it’s rooted in belonging, not control.

    This show will be a space for alchemy—transforming dystopian despair into visionary futures.

    Let’s map alternative ways of being: queer, Indigenous, speculative, and beautifully strange.

    If your work lives at the intersections of collapse and creation, send it my way. Let’s curate a future together.

    Deadline: May 12, 2025

    Submission details: email me at hyperion@thefyrthyr.org.

    Preferred Dystopias aren’t about fearing the end. They’re about imagining what comes next.

Architect of
Kákáw Kóhic Dékalé