Making Sanctuary with Bayo Akomolafe
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I’m still taking in all that Bayo had to share with us on Saturday, and I’m also going to go back again and again to re-listen to this session. It’s that rich and layered.
Bayo also shared with us during the session an article he recently wrote, linked below.
“One of the central questions I ask with this essay is: If this is indeed a war, do we really want to win it? What if winning is the worst possible outcome we could imagine? Do we want to come out on top, stamp out this viral enemy, and restore agency to the cold ossified tentacles of the familiar? Are we sure this disruption is not what we want, what we’ve cried for in unvoiced ways? Should we not treat this opening as our grand marronage, our fugitive departure from exhausted cottonfields?”
http://bayoakomolafe.net/project/i-coronavirus-mother-monster-activist/
WRITING PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION (SET A TIMER FOR 5 MINUTES, AND WRITE ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF THE PANDEMIC): When it came …. Somewhere along the line ….In the end ... During the workshop we touched on what’s been called the “Wood Wide Web”, the networks of mycelium beneath the surface of plant life. This has been one way I’ve imagined Rooted in the world, connecting us in different parts of the world in an exchange of resources and providing safe haven. Like anything, there’s the potential for harm, but we’re here to mediate that where we can.
Below are two wonderful shorts about mycelium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWOqeyPIVRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4m9SefyRjg
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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