We are living in a time of polarization. Cultural and educational institutions are confronted with the responsibility to provide tools and spaces for critical reflection, for engagement, and, more fundamentally, for meeting and recognizing each other in our differences. In this decolonial essay Rolando Vázquez introduces his critique which offers an option for thinking and doing beyond the dominant paradigms. It provides a critical analysis of modernity understood broadly as the western project of civilization, while it seeks to overcome the dominion of western epistemology and aesthetics and their embedded eurocentrism and anthropocentrism.

Importantly for decolonial thought we are all located in relation to the colonial difference that structures our modern/colonial order. It is only from an awareness of our positioned realities that we can enter in relation with each-other, that we can listen to each-other and learn each-other.

About the author: Rolando Vázquez is co-organizer of the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. He is associate professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Cluster Chair at University College Utrecht, Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

'Vistas of Modernity - Mondriaan Fund Essay 14' is a new title in a series of essays commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund.