An encounter by another name: O último dia de leão as a ‘beyond’ and ‘before’ experience

The experience of an encounter populates Tim Ingold’s 2011 book Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. Although Ingold decisively critiques premediated colonial encounters of the human mind and proposes a grounded approach for postcolonial encounters, his insights fall short of addressing the experience within the technological condition. Through a posthuman critique, the articulation of the experience from being purely in the physiologically here and now has seen a marked shift towards the transversal capacity of it trespassing linear temporal-spaces but also political, ecological, and social intersections (Ingold 2011; Haraway 2016; Braidotti 2018). However, while work in the field of postcolonial and posthuman studies has aimed to highlight the very aggression that has manifested in the mechanisms of the Modernity/ Coloniality project – delineating the encounter as a strategy primarily as acts of violence, a theoretical transgression through Sara Ahmed allows me to elaborate the experience as mediations that demonstrate the partial perception of encounters. With a reading of O Último Dia de Leão (Leo’s Last Day), a performance by Nany Dayanne, set within the condition of linguistic incommunicability, I present the mediated gesture of the experience, one aided with Ahmed’s understanding of it as an ethical ‘before’ and ‘beyond’, and present a proposition for an encounter by another name.