BORGARBÓKASAFNIÐ
Welcome to our interview series by J.J. Mancho: Chronicles from the Future! J.J. Mancho is a Reykjavik based artist who worked on documenting the Future Festival held in the Reykjavik City Library in March 2026. He conducted interviews with workshop hosts and project managers and is currently working on visuals too.
LEARNING TO DANCE WITH THE UNKNOWN: JUAN CAMILO ROMÁN ESTRADA
Juan Camilo Román Estrada is the intercultural officer of Háskoli Íslands (University of Iceland) and project manager of Sprettur HÍ, an educational program for the inclusion and integration of immigrants into higher education.
JJ: You hosted a workshop called “Learning to Dance with the Unknown”, to help people manage uncertainty. It seems that you’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time.
JC: Our current civilisation is basically egocentric and human-centric. The human being at the top of the pyramid. But how is our relationship with other forms of life? Part of that relationship is based on dominion over knowledge and a desire to control and know everything.
But when we look to other cultures that still survive and other forms of life, we realise about the limits of human perception and understanding. There is great wisdom in those limits. We can still perceive it, especially if we silence ourselves and do processes of decolonization and unlearning. If we open to spiritual ecology we realise that there are other types of wisdom beyond human understanding. So part of learning to dance with the unknown is accepting with humility that we can’t know everything.
JJ: We could say the more you want to control and accumulate knowledge to dominate everything and everyone, the less open you are to discover?
JC: We could ask ourselves, where does the great disconnection that the modern human being has with others, with nature, come from? True human wisdom is based on interconnection, on the awareness of interdependence. We forget that the main goal of wisdom is the good living. Living well implies doing it in community. We realised this during COVID; whether we like it or not, we are an ecosystem, an ecology.
JJ: Science is always open to discover something completely unexpected; there is hope there. Can we relate science with, perhaps, spirituality?
JC: It’s important to make a distinction. Scientific spirit is an attribute of the human being, however the capitalist mentality turned it into a tool of domination. But in itself, as well as religious or artistic spirits are attributes of the human being to explore reality.
And they do not belong to anyone. We tune in, sometimes even through great non-linguistic knowledge. That’s why it is so important to meditate, or attend ceremonies, or just spend time on something new, that’s how you encourage other components of your existence.
A poem from San Juan de la Cruz: This knowledge in unknowing / is so overwhelming / that wise men disputing / can never overthrow it / for their knowledge does not reach / to the understanding of not understanding / transcending all knowledge. Can you believe it? How crazy!
JJ: Thank you, that’s nice.
JC: It’s connected with learning the true meaning of freedom. It’s not to do what I want, but having the subtlety to accept and do what is required at the right time for collective well-being.
JJ: You finished the workshop asking the attendants which qualities we may need to nurture to face the future. We came out with humor, hope, solidarity… And you said grief, as an emotion that actually can help us.
JC: We live today in a collective neurosis, the result of unsolved problems and unhealed traumas. However, being able to find beautiful ways to transform your pain, and share it with the world, is a gift from the indigenous soul all of us have inside. This ability has been dismantled. In the 17th century, the Catholic Church issued a decree that prohibited the practice of mourning; crying at funerals was banned, under penalty of excommunication.
This kind of impositions over the population had an incredible impact, because Europe was not homogeneous. There were multiple communities that were disbanded, losing their knowledge, their perspectives, their ways of relating. And when the Europeans went to colonize Africa, America, the wise men, the elders, said: “These people already carry centuries of trauma.”
The issue of intergenerational trauma hasn’t been addressed since we deny to ourselves the practice of collective mourning processes. You lived in Tenerife, what the Spaniards did to the native communities there has not yet been healed. Still a lot of latent ongoing, right? Same thing in Europe and North America toward witchcraft. The number of women who were killed… Everything we have not yet been able to process, is like shadows, influencing how we live.
JJ: Since the economic system, the geopolitics, and how nation-states relate to each other nowadays were shaped by the European man, the white man, his trauma spread everywhere.
JC: It seems to be a very controversial topic. Although there is so much information lost in the sands of time, there are some pieces you can trace in certain mythologies and stories. Not only happened to the white man. But I would relate more to the institution of the patriarchy, which also happened in India and more. And the idea of the empire. There is something very adolescent here. For me, for me, for me, to be a hoarder.
JJ: To grow in a vampiric way.
JC: Yes, something like that. It seems that this concept of empire is a symptom of a consciousness degeneration. But when I said “lost in the sands of time” I mean we fell into this degeneration process when we started to record History, it seems like we were already decreasing.
JJ: You draw a straight line between toxic and immature masculinity and the idea of empire.
JC: It is fractal, like a branch that has the same shape of the whole tree. This imposed sense of separation between the human being and nature generates not a psychological problem, but a neurophysiological problem, a degeneration of perception. The transformation between late adolescence to true adulthood happens through an initiatory process. This process gets dismantled in the imperial structure. And you get now teenagers with nuclear heads.
JJ: Your son was in the workshop. He became an essential part of it. Was it intentional?
JC: I deliberately invited him because I am very interested in alternatives for education. Alternative education and intergenerational processes. I am very interested in how we learn together as a community. Modern schooling has separated us by ages. We need to promote spaces to cultivate knowledge that lives in all of us.
JJ: What would you like the next generation, your children, to improve or get better at?
JC: I really like if they cultivate, from a young age, a planetary consciousness. Not like us, indoctrinated in the idea of nation-state. An ecocentric life, where their endeavors, their projects consider life at the center. It took me a while to realise this, the sooner they’ll do that, the better for everybody.
More information:
Martyna Karolina Daniel
Project Manager of Equity and Community Engagement
martyna.karolina.daniel@reykjavik.is