DAY 2 : Bayo Akomolafe — Shapeshift: What Does it Mean to Be Well at the End of the World?
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In this talk, Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) suggests that being well, a function of good health, is intricately connected to the Anthropocene and the environmental troubles and losses we are experiencing. By thinking through the disciplinary practices of governing regimes and how bodies are created, how limitations are enacted, how status is assigned, how wellbeing is designated, Bayo weaves a disorienting cartography in an invitation to fall apart, to leave the conveniences of stable designations for something-yet-to-come. This is an exploration in decolonial wellbeing, an adventure into the vast reaches of the human body, into the promises of becoming fugitive.
Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes.
He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.
As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies.
He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.
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