Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Slowing Down in Urgent Times /155
Photo by Kei Black
Our hearts and minds are set to work by the urgent eco-social crises of this time. Caught in a cultural twitch of frenetic production and the sticky paradigms of modernity, we’ve penned vocabulary and designed technologies, manufactured frameworks and crunched numbers in an effort to diagnose and “treat” planetary collapse. We are invited by this week’s guest, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, to pause and abandon solutionism, step back from the project of progress, and dance into a different set of questions: What does the Anthropocene teach us as a destabilizing agent that resists our taming? How can we show up in our movements of justice if “the ways we respond to crisis is part of the crisis”? What happens when we unfurl into a space of slowness and relinquish human mastery to a wider cosmic net of relations?
“I wonder if the trickster isn’t beckoning at the wilds beyond our fences, wanting us to dance between the binary.”
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe by Rishika Nath
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden—and their mother, his wife and "life-nectar,” Ijeoma. An author, speaker, renegade academic, and proud father, Bayo is Chief Curator and Director of The Emergence Network, a constellation of humans and nonhumans working together trans-locally to curate projects, rituals, conversations and events that nurture senses of the otherwise via practices that trouble the traditional boundaries of agency and possibility. Bayo is also a visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has taught in universities around the world. He is a consultant with UNESCO, leading efforts for the Imagining Africa’s Future (IAF) project. Bayo has authored two books, We Will Tell Our Own Story! and These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, and has penned forewords for many others.
We are humbled to share this space with such a powerful thinker as Bayo, whose poetic invocations trace the flowering worlds of an entangled Universe of time, Indigenous realities, and fugitive space. Plunging into deep pools of philosophy and imagination, Ayana and Bayo’s conversation winds through dimensions of the new and the ancient: Yoruba mythology, children as guides to bewilderment, the strategy of separation, grieving as ceremony, trickster spirits, and the teachings of failure and brokenness. As we slow down to listen anew, may we stumble beyond the human story into sanctuaries of “the otherwise”—spaces for falling apart, shapeshifting, resting, and embodying new forms.
♫ Music by Daniel Higgs
References & Recommendations
The Emergence Network website and instagram
Bayo’s website and facebook
“Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction” by Deborah Bird Rose & Thom van Dooren’s
The Marrow by Ursula Le Guin
SCHOLARS & THEORISTS–
Fred Moten, Karen Barad, Helena Norburg, Jack Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), & Stephen Jenkinson
BAYO’S ARTICLES–
http://www.emergencenetwork.org/whatclimatecollapseasksofus/
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/when-you-meet-the-monster/
BAYO’S LECTURES–
For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.