From his research as a decolonial thinker, Rolando Vázquez argues that we cannot achieve a true understanding of our present without coloniality, that is, without the destruction of the earth and the erasure of worlds that sustain our everyday reality.

Coloniality as a design-led historical movement circulates not only through the economy and the state, but also through aesthetics, through the forms in which we reimagine and re-experience our reality. Decolonial aesthetics is a critique of modern aesthetics and seeks that which is silenced under the normativity of the contemporary.

Dr. Rolando Vazquez is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt, Middelburg, and Cluster Chair at University College Utrecht, Utrecht. Since 2010, he has been, together with Walter Mignolo, co-director of the annual Decolonial Summer School. In 2016, under the direction of Gloria Wekker, he co-authored the 'Let's do Diversity' report of the Diversity Committee of the University of Amsterdam.

In 2020, he published Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary and in 2021, together with Hicham Khalidi, he published the essay 'A new Bauhaus? The debate for a more inclusive Europe' as a response to the new European Green Deal of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.