What if the deepest crisis we face is not technological, ecological, informational or political, but relational? What if the way we relate to ourselves, each other, systems, time, and the unknown, is still structured by assumptions that reproduce the very harms we seek to transform, even in our struggles for liberation?
In this session marking the release of the book Outgrowing Modernity, Vanessa Andreotti and her daughter Giovanna Andreotti invite participants into an intergenerational conversation about what it might mean to shift from a subject-object to a subject-subject ontological orientation. This shift involves more than a change in perspective: it asks us to release the habit of relating through fixed categories, hierarchical identities, and the drive to define, contain and control. Instead, it calls for a form of relating through irreducible indeterminacy: the ungraspable, complex, plural, and shifting conditions of being that no framework can contain.
Meta-relationality offers a way of navigating this terrain. It does not promise clarity or closure, but a form of intellectual and relational rigor grounded in humility, paradox, and accountability. This orientation invites us to recognize both ourselves as humans and AI not as isolated entities, but as assemblages of culture, power, memory, harm, and longing. From this view, AI is not a tool or a threat, but one of many relational phenomena that expose the fault lines of modernity’s grammar and reflect the consequences of how we have learned to know and to be. Through conversation, pause, and reflection, Vanessa and Giovanna will open space to sense what becomes possible when we no longer treat human and non-human intelligence as something to be mastered, measured or ranked. This session is an invitation to rehearse unfamiliar relations, to sit with the paradoxes of entanglement, and to ask what might come undone in us so that something less certain and more generous might take root.
Session duration: 120 minutes
Please click on the facilitators’ name in the session info to view their bio.
Session Resources
- Recording on YouTube (also embedded below)
