During the last years decolonial thinking has grown as a new epistemology to deal the coloniality of power. However, awareness has emerged with the criticism addressed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui against the explicit forms of coloniality used by Walter Mignolo and associated scholars at Duke University to introduce this epistemology in the global anglophone north. This paper follows Cusicanquis criticism in relation to the newly established school of decolonial thinking headed by Ramon Grosfoguel and Enrique Dussel in Caracas, and which counted with the personal support of the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Based in an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in short periods between 2010-2018 in Caracas the paper contests the approach used by these scholars of coloniality to deal the transition of Venezuela toward a supposedly decolonial regime. The paper argues that as far as key aspects of a decolonial methodology are not adopted in the research, such as to be entangled in the struggling stories among different constellations of grassroots movements in Venezuela, the approach used by Grosfoguel and Dussel turns instead into another showcase of the coloniality of power.

Juan Velasquez Atehortua is PhD in Human Geography from the University of Stockholm, and Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg – Sweden. Velasquez has been working with different approaches on participatory action research to develop FEMSUSDEV, an ethnographic video archive on feminist sustainable development accessible in youtube and Vimeo. Building the archive has been seminal to establish the decolonial agenda that will be presented at the conference.

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