Writing from the rubble: Digital epistolary friendship (post)apocalypse

This paper interweaves fragments of our digital epistolary exchanges with the exercises and prompts we practiced during long-distance online meetings. We reflect on our first conversation, sparked in a taxi en route to an abandoned construction site in Oaxaca—once meant to be a luxury hotel, now reclaimed by a local arts collective. Amidst its post-apocalyptic remains, we found ourselves fervently discussing class hierarchies in the UK, from supermarket rankings to the neoliberalisation of higher education. Our shared frustrations as feminist scholars navigating colonial academia led us to seek alternative ways of thinking, writing, and creating. Inspired by our engagement with La Pocha Nostra, Vanessa de Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, and the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, we explore online performance practices that disrupt the linear, univocal narratives reinforced by hetero-patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist citational traditions. Through this work, we intentionally center friendship and joy as regenerative praxis—while resisting their reduction to depoliticised individualism. Holding space for contradiction, complicities, and complexity, we draw on exercises from Machado de Oliveira and La Pocha Nostra to structure our creative methodologies, embracing messiness as a necessary condition for epistemic and artistic transformation.