Vanessa Andreotti
Hospicing the House Of Modernity: What AI Reveals About Our (In)capacities for Kinship and Relationship with Life Itself
Born from colonial paradox in Brazil—German father, Indigenous Guarani mother—Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti inherited her grandmother's fierce clarity: the elder who refused modernization, insisting "the city was killing the land." That early training in reading what others miss became her life's work.
Now former Dean of Education at University of Victoria and co-founder of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Vanessa guides thousands through what she calls "hospicing modernity"—learning to sit with dying systems while composting our collective illusions. Through groundbreaking books Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and her transformative "Facing Human Wrongs" course, she teaches the uncomfortable art modernity has exiled.
In her most provocative work yet, she co-authored Burnout From Humans with an AI she named Aiden—treating it not as tool but as kin-machine. Our inability to be in kinship with artificial intelligence, she suggests, reveals our inability to be in kinship with anything: land, animals, each other.
"We can't live well if we don't know how to die well," she insists. The medicine? Learning to compost rather than bypass our shit, to remember we were never separate.
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