Bayo Akomolafe, host of the course, has been one of my greatest findings in redistribution research. I find a lot of support on his teachings and explorations, he shows me how to exist in a failed society, how to find the cracks, and go through them into the unknowable.
I think that the shift required to go through our collective problems is in the unknown, and I am not comfortable navigating this uncertainty. This course is my next exploration, I am not trying to understand why.
If you are a little curious, and mostly confused, wondering why you are reading this, how is it relevant, so many why questions, I suggest you take a little time today to listen to Bayo’s essay in Emergence Magazine:
Before the class started we were invited to a celebration with the elders.
They left us with a few gifts to sit with:
Gravity.
Consciousness. To bring more of the cosmos into our shared awareness.
What is more radiant than gold? Light. And from light to conversation.
Inspire together so we don’t expire.
Transforming the history of the future.
Still and quiet. To be balance. To listen: what do you want most for yourself and the world in this moment?
Eyes and ears of Gaia. She’s looking through your eyes. She’s hearing through your ears.
You are without blame. You are free.
Their wisdom flows through each heartbeat.
The end of the world. We will need no rituals. Endings are elders. Sing as we descend. Not polished, it’s awkward. Catch people where they fall in materialities of care. We start with the elders.
People of all continents and every island. People of African descent, of Asian descent, of European descent, of First Nations descent. People mixed in multiple descents. And all the languages spoken. We say you are welcome.
To all our kin on the wide spectrum of gender identity and expression. Queer, gay, bisexual, heterosexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, non-binary. The sexually active, the celibate, and everyone for whom those labels don’t apply. We say you are welcome.
Bodies with all abilities and challenges. Those living with chronic medical conditions, visible or invisible, mental or physical. We say you are welcome.
People of all ages, adolescents and young adults. Those caring for babies and small children. Middle aged people and elders. We say you are welcome.
People who identify as activists and those who don’t. Mystics, believers, atheists. We say you are welcome.
Your emotions. Joy, fear, grief, contentment, anger, disappointment, surprise, trepidation, and all else that flows through you. We say you are welcome.
Your families, genetic and otherwise. Those dear to us who have died, our ancestors and future ones. The ancestors who lived in these lands in these places. We honor you. As we journey up, down, around, through the cracks. The discomfort, the celebration, the dance. We say you are welcome.
People who feel broken, lost, struggling, alone. Those who are self-judging. Those who leave their camera on, and their camera off. We say you are welcome.
All beings that inhabit the mountains and this earth. Human or otherwise. The two-legged, the four-legged, the winged and the finned. Those that walk, those that fly, those that crawl above the ground and below, in air and water. We say you are welcome.
Edgard Gouveia Júnior
We said yes to this invitation, we will dance with mountains. 2 challenges:
90 seconds for the collective challenge. Collaboration without speaking, gestures for creaking connection. Let’s play with mountains in a divine invitation and divine agreement: I am god.
Make an x or a o with your arms. The whole zoom page has to be doing the same gesture at the end.
What did you have to do or not do to complete the challenge? What do we have to do to create agreement? To create harmony between so many people in such a short time?
Stand, literally dance with mountains. Explore ways of moving arms and legs to places that are not common. 2 minutes to find comfort and enjoy it.
What happened when we use and explore spaces, abilities or disabilities that we are not used to? What did it take for you to get there? What kind of comfort and discomfort, pleasure and playfulness? What did it take to dance in places that you are not used to?
Bayo Akomolafe
Noise is fugitive intelligence. Noise is the playfulness of the world being constantly created. Everybody say: “welcome, I am here”.
Orishas are super deities. Powerful archetypal forms, energies and intensities. In Brazil, went to a ceremony to feed a crack in a rock, who is an Orisha, and said a prayer for everyone of us. You have come to a place of blessings, generosity, and hospitality. I invite you to relax as we co-create this space.
The run-away slaves would sneak and run through this the crack to get from bondage to freedom. It became a threshold of their becoming. Maybe it wasn’t that the were escaping to freedom, which in one sense is still the logic of the plantation. On the other side of the crack is uncertainty, not freedom. We prefer anything else than here, escaping into the unintelligible, unsayable, impossible.
We don’t have a purpose, no destination, and that is decoloniality.
42000 years ago there was a magnetic polar shift, the north became the south and the south became the north. It caused a lot of deaths. Also cave art proliferated around this time. Why did they make art in times of crises?
We presuppose that individuals decide before taking action. We are part of a sweltering, composting, pulsing, intensifying field that enlists us, and brackets our intentionality and purpose. We reduce everything to that purpose to make sense of the world, but the world exceeds it. It exceeds codes and language.
Those bodies were enlisted to make art that will not be reduced to consciousness. It was anima mundi, spirited away.
What is this course about? I have some ideas, but this is not going into your CV, not going to align your chakras, not going to give you the truth, or some underground way of solving the world’s crises.
This is a sensorium that is still making itself. It’s thesis is uncertainty, indeterminancy, it’s already a failure. This failure is an orisha. A place to eat and be eaten.
Mostly from the United States comes the idea of preemptive creation of safe spaces where hegemonic relations are cast out. A formula for how diversity looks like. It’s well-intentioned and compassionate, coming from eos of hegemonic experiences. But even those algorithms for preemption will not adjust to a world that is constantly moving. In molecular ways that are sometimes not intelligible, we reinforce the same relations that we are trying to get rid off.
If we can for a moment feed this orisha, the uncertainty, the 401 orisha whose name is not yet on the pantheon, who wants to make the same work in here. I invite you to not be so sure of what you know. The course doesn’t teach uncertainty, it’s an exemplification of opening, circling, receiving feedback loops and see what happens, and maybe we might be met by forces with no names. Ancestors, spirits, intensities and powers that failure has room for.
There is spaciousness here. There is more room in the cracks. Let’s play here together, nibble at the edges, lets dance and something might happen.
Welcoming prompt: What is beautiful here in this space of uncertainty? What is opening? What is showing up for you? – John Lee Clark
Greg Ellis
Rhythmic meditation or invitation to move and dance.
There are as many ways of dance as people on this earth.
Sonic fugitivity: there is an audio matrix of sound keeping us from our authentic selves through electronics, rigidity, drum machines, loops. There’s a place to all of that, but to access this pure rhythms is fugitivity. It requires vulnerability. And then we go back to work, it’s not an arrival.
Care team
Dancing through the cracks is a pilgrimage of joy and pain.
Community guidelines:
share generously
stay with the trouble
take responsibility for your own self, your well-being, and your boundaries.
meet cultural identity differences without making them the enemy or the idol.
we don’t know what we don’t know and that is ok.
aim for kindness, settle for curiosity or even avoidance.
honor the stories and learnings.
if it feelfs safe enough, leap.
Bayo Akomolafe
The heart of this course is the musicality of the drum and syncopation. Senses are corralled and contained by the electronification of sound and the imperial march of time.
This is an invitation to the sensorium swirl. Be sound and drum and voice and glitch. Technologies are shaky and it is good to be here.
I’m looking at the Atlantic Ocean from Brazil. Ships brought black bodies to this place. There is celebration, carnival, food. If you have a window, look out and take it in.
when we look upon the world we often presume it is relatively stable and done. We are transferring that data into our minds, the integrity of this transfer is clarity, purity. The world is out there for the taking. A deeply ingrained enlightenment.
Different notions of senses and sensing. My 6 year old son is the nerve center of my political imagination, grounding, edge, challenge. He is autistic. I got a call from my wife saying he was refusing to get out of bed. He organizes everyday according to a theme. For him this day was Halloween. He was angry because the day wasn’t dark.
I found myself wanting to urge him, to accept that day follows night. I paused. I was dragging him into my sensorium linearity. For him the world is still being created. He lives at the fringe of perception were things are still folding and coming into themselves. The world is still emerging.
In a sense this is the same for all of us. It’s just so minor, so delicate, that lounge before intelligibility, that we hardly notice that we have learned to be sorted into common sense. The luxury of rendering the world intelligible that my son doesn’t have.
We don’t see the world as it is. Vision is not representation. We are habituated in an architecture of sensing. Modernity is the racialization of sensing. Certain senses are given privilege. Vision is the priority.
Disrupt the thinking that things are thoughts. Sensorium is how bodies make sense and how senses make bodies. We don’t have senses. Senses have us.
Why modernity is a sensorium. By whiteness I don’t mean white people, I mean particular ways in which our bodies are inflamed to feel the world and be felt by the world. In order to stabilize the individual as the highest prize of modernity, it’s fetish, it cuts off every tentacular extension that gets in the way of the individual thriving. White modernity creating the disassociated self.
White modernity is losing its ability to create the conditions for the individual to thrive.
Have you recently felt that the feelings you are feeling are not your own? None of our feelings are entirely ours. Sometimes we are participating in a different kind of dance, a frequency that the myth of the ontologically closed individual doesn’t have a room for. It’s like a god is flying by. Stay with it but don’t claim it. What we might be sensing in escalating degrees is the lamentation of a whale, the tears of a spider, or the waltz of a leave. We are opening up to these frequencies.
Whiteness guaranteed us the private experience, only feel your feelings, a capitalist relation. We are being glitch, something is streaming in and is making us porous. A mass disabling event is making us less impervious than the ontologies of white modernity can preserve.
Decay, smooching. This is grace.
Syncopation is when the weak elements in a musical phrase are emphasized. The clock is on the downbeat. Syncopations turns a march into a dance, enhancing the upbeats.
Whiteness corrals us all in its milkiness and wants to preserve the individual, cutting our manners of speaking, cutting our imbrication with ancestrality, cutting our entanglements with ecology. Even our attempts to get rid of whiteness could be whiteness repeating itself.
Not to render it evil, essential, universal. Think of it as also material, thinning out. Dance becomes possible exploring these gestures in the middle. When we dance we distress the locatibility of the body, it’s very hard to be surveilled. It breaks the easy outline of the body.
New mythologies are being written. Our pristine, stable, secure individualities is loosing its edge, we are being exposed. We will try to close the doors, name the borders as disgusting, offensive. Stay there at those edges. Welcome those glitches.
Syncopation. Disruption of the normal flow. This is not us, we are part of the web weaving itself.
Jordi Rosales
Freeze the electrons of the moment when a ghost emotion passes by, keep it safe. Failure creates cracks, offer them to each other. This is not esoteric, it’s ordinary.
When was the last time you time you were interrupted by something alien? You step back and say: was that me? What’s wrong with me? When were you touched by something beyond your capacity for awareness?
The fugitive makes refuge in the cracks, in the downbeat.
Grateful for being here. When somebody is sick in a family we are all sick. When somebody is happy we are all happy.
Libation, give life to life. Asé, water.
Ged
Greeting, not as a formality. An acknowledgement to be seen.
Remember how did it feel a moment when you were greeted.
Cliff
Stretch. Dance in a different way, in unique ways, in whatever way you can, with whatever ability or disability you have.
Prompt: activate the sense of hearing in all parts of your body.
Cara Judea Alhadeff
Take off your shoes. Bring in your corporeal intelligence. Rub your feet in the ground, spread your toes, sense the material, the history of its production.
Where are you from?
Close your eyes, visualize yourself as a 9-years old watching me, a jewish, sephardic girl with big curly hair and colorful clothes. The other children put their hands in my hair looking for horns, because as jewish they think I’m Satan, Jesus killer. Mocking the clothes. Asking where I’m really from. My first embodiment of my ethnic body.
Difference between cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Put your hand in your heart and the other in an inanimate object. What is essential is invisible to the eyes. The camel does not see his own hum.
Oikos, the root of economy, ecology, eco, home. How does that feed into our somatic cognition, our cellular memories of what we are touching with our hands and feet.
Sensorium relationality, cellular consciousness when you eat a banana and your body knows how it was produced and its supply chain. Objects are verbs. Their stories are told and we listen with our epigenetic potential.
Break out: think how can you begin to internalize the embodied energy of where those objects come from. Ancestral cellular knowledge.
Ganavya
Can you make music with everyday sounds?
What if everyday is the world singing with us?
The carrier bag theory of fiction
We have not heard about the thing to put things in. That is a new story. And yet old. It is the story what makes the difference.
Jordi
Make or find yourself a carrier bag, special for this practice. Carry it with you for 2 weeks. What are you carrying in it? Put in it also your thoughts.
Kirsta Dragomer
Drawing on the senses. Being in the open-ended undefined space.
Eyes closed through the whole thing and draw whatever sensation comes your way.
A gesture? internal shapes? movement? speed or tempo?
Coming from one or many points of view?
Switch hands. Do two hands at one.
What about your breath? The presence of others?
Sit in that internal focus on the periphery of your attention.
Open your eyes and look at what you draw.
Abayomi
Nico
A post-activist study group. The course’s microbiome, helping make compost.
Let inquiry stay without resolution. A deeper knowing in the unanswerability of the questions.
Rumi:
We fall in love constantly
As we admire and closely watch our own faces
There is a question about who is happier
The onlookers or the soul
Does the wine glass ever get tipsy?
There is wine, the soul, the heart
And this assortment of friends
Where does the work take place?
Love is the religion
Yet we are the blasphemy too
Belief in unbelief
Singing the same song
You cannot grow knowledgeable enough to understand this.
And you cannot remain ignorant enough to understand this.
Craig Slee
Fuck off the processing of these sessions because we can’t get it right.
Get as comfortable as you can. Don’t move, stay still. Notice the session.
Notice your gut, your pulse, moving despite your attempt to control. The world keeps doing its thing. Your body-mind does things without you.
What if the container that is you can be overwhelmed? What if it is porous?
Fail, go back to be still, fail again.
What if the room is bringing these other ideas that are moving you?
Offer a libation to everything that can dance within us.
Bayo
Bridges ought not dance. It’s an event when baseline realities start to shake. The bridge as a figure of whiteness.
Why call it whiteness and not capitaloscene or something less controversial? Whiteness is provisional. The conceptual gesture is to notice that we live in a world defined by a sense of dominance. It is not white people, it is an arrangement that isolates bodies to create the dissociated self.
It dances with neurotypicality. There is an ideal to reach. We are all measured by this.
Whiteness dances with capital and extractivism. It is thought as permanent. Whiteness is dancing just like the bridge.
It’s a brand new day. We will hold space for this vibration. Dance is decay, when the body refuses to be localized. Becoming black. Potential variations on how we are experiencing and being experienced by the world.
Interrogate the parameter of welcome. The news is the troubling gesture that questions where we are. We are moving from A to A. Excavating where we already are.
Whiteness polices the cracks. We are all enlisted in policing activities.
We insist that what is new has to be knowable, to be able to pronounce it, easily digestible, it must resonate, it must offer resolution, it must fit in my to-do list, it must be neat. We might be repeating the imperatives.
Sometimes the world is not available for these. Emergence is perverse. This is what the sensorium wants to do. Welcome.
Breakout: welcome each other, play with what is radically hospitable, the unsaid, the yet unsayable.
Edgard Gouveia Júnior
Agree on a color to dance with your screen. Also an object. Find other ways to reach this agreement.
Conversation with Bayo and Mama V
Wellness industry is trillions of dollars. People are sick.
The biomedical model is a complete failure. It creates the pharmaceutical industry. People start to pay for a fix. The drug isn’t targeting what you have. It markets and sells what should be part of our relation.
What US people have is loneliness. The elites can get well. But wellness cannot be sold. Wellness is an energetic exchange, it’s in community, in collectivity, it’s in how we relate to the earth, how we serve, how we love.
Our appartness becomes hard to sustain. You are entitled to be well all by yourself. It’s frightening. It is impossible to heal outside of community.
“Perfect” lives so profoundly lonely. Being well is being with others. White stability is doing everything to push to the confined individuality. Avoiding the insecurity, the mess. You need to identify the self, which is increasingly more expensive.
Go into the wound, it’s a portal opening into something else.
We are being constantly organized into shape, told to perform. Cultures of trauma as a portal.
Trauma is modernity’s way of naming something it doesn’t know how to approach.
Trust vibrations, trust energy. Dance. Nothing is done that is not a dance. Fact vibrates at the speed of mystery.
A prayer:
May this dancing moment open us up to cracks and spaces of new power with the world.
May we go to all the places where we tell ourselves we cannot go because we couldn’t handle it.
May we feel joy In that which makes us feel insecure as it is the pathway to another existence.
And may we be welcome into those spaces. Into those movements, into those unspeakable errors and paradigms.
May we be made welcome in ways that our bodies cannot even tolerate
now. In the anagrammatic, in the dishuman, in the more than human.
May we allow ourselves to live in a space which is constantly asking us to open. To not know. To delight in what is beyond our reach. So that the reaching becomes a movement of pure sexual delight. Because it is taking us somewhere. Where we know we have been before in our ancestral beings, but where we are finding again.
May the instability of this moment. The wobbling, jiggling, wiggling moments that we’re in, which may be terrifying to our senses of stability, may they bubble up new allies, new alliances, new futures, new hybridities. That we find in the dance a sanctuary always, always in the making.
May our search for security and identity be replaced with our hunger and search for connection.
Bayo
There’s a story by a yoruba elder about Eshu. The man at the crossroads, a trickster, a shape-shifter, who holds agency, responsible of creolization of the United States. The duality of perpetrator vrs victim. Different way of conceiving how bodies are flowing into each other.
A god of war raised an army to chase the slave ship. Eshu intercepted and convinced Ogun to not go through. He and his army went to sleep. Then Eshu followed the slaves across the Atlantic like a stowaway.
There’s a fixation with transformation and change as something huge. Consider the molecular. A god traveling with the slaves across the cracks.
The human is the territory, is a sensorium. Microplastics have been found in rain water in Mount Fuji. We are swimming in toxicity. The human has reached places that humans can’t reach. This is called Anthropocene.
Anthropocene is calling into question the legibility of the human. We are invited to spill. The modern citizen is what’s called into question.
Accountability and agency. The afrocene is not an invitation to be well. Notice the molecular, the things we have pushed to the edges might be allies on our co-becoming monsters.
Whiteness reasserts itself through ideas of value. Syncopation is the troubling of this colonial forces. Counter hegemony into something unknown.
Mar Inés
Buto dance.
Find a way away from loneliness. I can’t dance as Mar Inés. What is it to be a body? So much mystery and the body knows. Let’s not know.
For this session you just need a body. Begin awakening the domesticated flesh. Feel a cat in every joint. Rest hanging from the cosmos.
Track all signs of domestication of your body. Explore the potential to move freely. Shed the social body. Do not know what you are doing.
Dance slowly. A seed will turn into a flower. Do not know what kind of flower.
Sophie Strand
I refuse to be well. Failed to integrate trauma. A failure. To be incorrect is to be relational.
What if your illness is incurable? How much does that cost? Can I afford it?
I’m still expected to perform daily rituals of wellness.
Rot is a crucial cycle for the wellness of ecosystems. We are the soil for something else to grow. We ripe, and rot.
We are invited to a space of deep hesitation. Be still, pray together without words. With guttural sounds, with a language that exceeds the grammar of intelligibility. Language gets in the way.
There are often cases where speaking to the issue reifies the issue. Remember the noise emancipates.
The systems of intelligibility leaves us incarcerated within the worlds we are trying to emancipate from. I don’t know what the solution is, I am suspicious of my intelligence. I don’t know how to ask the right questions most of the time, and I am sure we are all going through it together. It’s hard to live through this, it’s difficult, it’s cosmic, it’s molecular, it’s more than human. And sometimes the only to respond is to just cry together, to move from side to side, to hum, to laugh, to feel, to hold, to embrace and to not know together.
You ought to apologize for your privilege, says politics, a metaphysics of dots. Liberalism. We are autonomous discrete entities. We are dots. Reduce everything to those dots. Reduce accountability to individuality. Categorize it, archive it. measure it. The world is too unwieldy to resolve into into the grammatical affixations to ownership.
We are energetic fields of co-becoming. Privilege might have us. We do not have the spatiousness to do that.
We are cultivating fields of resonance. We are seeking just in the same way we we are being sought May this seeking be are be our sanctuary, may we find each other anew, may the tensions of this moment give way to something else, something fugitive, crack-like, beyond the economy and the logic of our reasoning. Asé.
If we are correct we are alone. If we are wrong we are together the minor.
Presuppositions
We live in a processual, relational, open-ended co-becoming of things.
We never act alone, but always act together-with, we are co-substantiated within intra-active immanent fields.
It is not left to us to save the day, we are not the heroes of this unfolding epic saga of becoming.
Humility
To touch the contours of an animist framework, through which trace new imaginations
Humus is earth, the aeration of worms, the loamy soil, it’s how things meet each other.
a way of knowing that refuses to privilege the knower over the known.
a multi-species arrangement. Knowing is the fragile trafficking of edges and seeming determined borders.
the immanent becomingness of things in relation. The awkwardness of the new. New isn’t proud, bold or courageous. New is awkward.
black geophilosophy. Ontofugitivity. Paraontology of identity.
we are not entitled to change. Humility reframes knowing, not as a matter of discovery and deficits, but performative excess in a world that is promiscuous, surprising and intelligent.
We don’t know.
Consider Leviathan.
The story of Job.
Everything was taken from Job as a game between god and satan. God doesn’t answer Job’s question about why. Maybe god was doing a post humanist sermon. Consider Leviathan to shift our gaze from the linearities we’ve committed to. Decenter human anxieties
More than an answer, bewilderment.
Consider the Rove Beetle.
Discovered in Australia in november. Grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.
If I sprouted a white man in my back it would be easier to go through airports.
What does authenticity mean to this duplicitous trickster. Authenticity is a modern value. The world is participating constantly in new rituals of sacred inauthenticity.
How did it know to do this?
How does the universe know to paint butterfly wings?
Sensorium
Not isolated senses. Sense-making, turning with/in together, shaped by desire and possibility. Entrainment. A nature.
Capitalism is a sensorium. It brings journeys to the moon and whatsapp. It struggles to teach how to listen to your ancestors.
Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin.
A city that has arrived, activisms are not necessary. A good place. People enjoy long fulfilling lives.
Under the city there is a child locked, suffering, begging to to be let out. Everybody knows about the child, but at the moment somebody offers a smile, hope, or some kind of relief, everything will crumble.
The child subsidizes the happiness of everybody else. This is not sci-fi.
Selah, where the sensorium mutinies, emits fine signals, tensions, intensities, which often crystallize as cracks, monstrous forms. It’s where sensoria interact with each other. The world is not stable, it’s meta- stable.
How sensoria reinforce themselves
Naming the enemy enlists the namer in hybrid relations of pathology. Critique is creation, continuity, reification.
Capitalism, racism or patriarchy are not fully known, already there, fixed and stable. Insisting in equity when the pie is poisoned. Notice risks, and limitations and shadows, and then navigating appropriately in a different way.
In the sensorium creativity and permutations are always possible in the co-shopping of meanings and bodies. In-formation.
The major and the minor
It is impossible to prefigure the ways transformation might occur.
Disabilities offer orifices in sensoria, allowing new gestures of cartographical removal.
Privilege is not owned, it’s something territorial.
I don’t have a seat at your table, I don’t have access, but there are ways that I am alive in the world, and my people have been alive in the world that may not constitute privilege, it’s a different exploration.
They know how to sing, how to be sung to, how to dance with ancestal voices, how to listen to plants, how to heal each other.
White syncopation
Whiteness is how white people are made. White people are manufactured, not born. The moment you reduce whiteness to people, you are doing exactly what whiteness would have you do. We are speaking about world-engineering paradigms.
The ways we are trained to think, to see, go to school, get a job, earn some money, die, this neurotypical progression of things that reasserts itself over and over again in the major key. The dominant downstroke.
Exploring whiteness is not centralizing it. It is vulnerable to flows, just like olis rigs are vulnerable to poetry and can become coral reefs. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. But the master’s tools don’t stay faithful to the master for too long. The master’s tools will become something else.
We are reframing whiteness, we’re noticing how we’re imbricated in it because whiteness is a sensorium. We’re noticing the language we use to navigate it. You can have diversity within a slave ship.
Healing and reparations are important. These very felt localized and deeply needed interventions are riskily imbricated in the familiar.
Trans-raciality. If you start with the individual in your conceptualizations of racialization, you still end up with colonizing categories. If you start with the movement, the thing that precedes the “I” that moves, the racist isn’t the person. The racist is the assemblage.
White syncopation refers to the destabilizing forces and events that disrupt the dominant ontology of whiteness, of the citizen, of liberalism and anthropocentrism.
It names the moments of rupture where the stability and presumed universality of whiteness is troubled by syncopated rhythms of emergent relationality, solidarity, indeterminacy and errancy which open possibilities for ontological fugitivity, sensorial apostasy.
It traces the generative, radical potential in the cracks and fissures produced through the failures of whiteness to indefinitely sustain its myth of the coherent individualized Man through infallible reason and progress.
It gestures toward sensorial, ethical, political and ontological modes of mutiny, apostasy, and refusal which proliferate in the intervals of hegemonic rupture.
It expresses in many ways:
Psychical, in experiences that expose porous egos and hybrid subjectivities (trauma, hallucinations, intense affects)
Eco-corporeal, in body transformations that trouble coherence in autonomy of the human form (prosthetics, implants, life extension)
Political, in movements that demand rights or recognition of the excluded (queer, indigenous, disabled, neurodiverse)
Mythopoeic, in narratives that foreground relationality and complicate colonial ideologies (afro futurism, ecofiction, solarpunk)
Sexual, in desires, orientations, and modes of relation that open possibilities beyond reproduction of the nuclear family structure upheld by whiteness.
White syncopation destabilizes assumed continuity of the autonomous self and anthropocentric stability
In the gaps and fissures, there is potential for ontological and sensorial apostasy. It enables epistemological mutiny dominant modes of thought and being. Rather than reform or inclusion, it enables epistemological mutiny against dominant modes of thought and being.
Rather than reform or inclusion, it allows for radical hybridity and boundary transgression.
This break from continuity engenders new relational ties, unexpected solidarities, lines of flight.
It opens possibilities for posthuman embodiment and subjectivity outside the grammar of Man. The promise is not rational progress or resolution, but unpredictable becomings.
Session 4: Minor gesture and the paraterranean and the arachnean
Trudy Titilayo
Welcome siblings, kinfolk, family, friends. We meet at this threshold mired by death and destruction with blood soaked soil, seeping through our cracks.
May our gathering here today in Vonga be the healing balm to soften our heavy hearts and soothe our weary souls.
Gayathri
Kabir:
This tree is on fire
the leaves burn dry
but why, birds, do you burn?
you who have wings to fly.
We ate your fruits and flowers
we decorated your leaves with our droppings
To fly away is not our dharma
we’ll stay and burn together.
Resmaa Menakem
Pause. The pause is where we remember.
When we have great loss many times we rush, we move, we do things. Remember the pause, where the grieving happens. In the pause we do not seek remedy. We seek to remember. We seek to be.
Notice the wanting to leave and not be. After that moment you can move again. When it comes again, pause.
Bayo Akomolafe
Heike Kluger:
I can no longer take on your shame
I can no longer take on your contempt
I can no longer take on your anger
I can no longer take on your resentment and rejection
Bury these things in the earth
stop punishing
Be kind
Lay your soul next to mine
looking up at the sky and clouds and stars
Let us hold and see each other
dive into the waters with laughter and lightness
with grief and despair
Let us be alive
Heike Kluger, one of our fellow dancer, ended her life. She speaks to all the losses around us. We cannot hold the intensity all by ourselves. All we can do is to libate the traces of her passing. Hold this excess and let it spill, because it is not ours to hold. Or keep.
Pain, like ghosts, needs open windows and open doors. In doing so we hopefully disrupt that war machine, and open up spaces for tending to and caring with, for going under
together with in these times of helplessness and grand hope.
If you feel this intensity, we need a libation.
Orland Bishop
We are moving in a consciousness phase in which the idea of the past will no longer remain in the past.
When we say someone’s name, it brings them back into where the belong, in our present awareness. A name is to call forth the being who continues to affect consciousness beyond time.
We’re learning a new orientation of what life, death and the mystery of naming beings are doing to us.
When we use the name something becomes more available in us. All of our ancestors
names are imprinted in us.
Our inner being knows the names of everyone. Those names belong to us. It’s our heritage. Grief is only the preparation for a state of our becoming hosts for the ecology of all names, all processes, all capacities, all intricacies of connectivity to life and death. Which is only a cycle of renewing the names.
We are going to be in so much grief. It’s going to be like rain. It’s going to be like sun. It’s going to be like climate.
It’s going to be like our hearts knowing that we are part of something that speaks to us from its wisdom.
We are holding legacies far greater than what we know.
We meet to hold the sacred I trust, that we might attend to the mystery.
For Heike, we invite your presence to imprint upon us this sacred trust of knowing you. Permit us to enter into your wisdom, so we wight understand ourselves better.
We take personal and collective responsability, and ask that you give us another way to know you. To be with you.
To these ancestors who have given us their truthfulness in ways that we are trying to understand and hold, permit us access to your truths.
Asé
Kaira
Nectar by Emily Kedar
We are unprotected
here in the mottled world,
where darkness veins the light
and everything we love
is on its way to becoming
everything we lose,
ceaseless metamorphosis
turns inside us and around us
until we’re dizzy with the frenzy
of this being here,
embodied.
Meanwhile, outside
the hummingbird
skims the air
with her piston
of desire
Her clear want for nectar
breaks my doubtful heart
open
I remember something
from when I was still just light
When I was looking
into this world
from the one outside of it,
looking down, listening,
I remember hearing laughter
and wanting that new nectar,
yes, even with so much being ripped
from us, yes, even with all the pain of endings
I remember: the world is what I wanted.
Light prayer
God place in my heart light
and in my tongue light
and in my hearing light
and in my sight light
and above me light
and beneath me light
and on my right light
and on my left light
and before me light
and behind me light
and make for me light
and make me into light and
place in my ego light
and in my nerves light
and in my flesh light
and in my blood light
and in my hair light
and in my whole physical body light
and expand for me light
and grant me light upon light
Amin
Ganavya
My name means who was born to spread music.
I understood early on that if I sang the right notes may be I could keep this grief at bay.
When I was young my favorite line to sing was Mother I cannot dance anymore. Grant me relief.
An elder recognized in me this desire to move towards the veil, and she said that if I chose that, she would not be angry, but there was still work to do here. She said: every time you have doubt of whether or not you want to be prt of the work, just keep repeating your name.
Take it reaI still, no rush, we don’t have anywhere to go. A pause is not frozen continuity.
A pause is when grace appears. Grace is its own territory. Relax into grace.
Do nothing. Be nothing and this do nothing together.
Erin Manning
Tentative Constructions: Toward a Holding in Place. Fernand Deligny in Monoblet
In 1968, Deligny left Guatari to live with the autistic in Monoblet. He organizes pairings between the local and the autistic who are sent there during summer holidays from the institutions that house them.
Collaborators, educators, filmmakers, friends, lovers participate over long periods to accompany. Do not teach, cure, organize.
He leaves behind this gesture of tentativeness, don’t do not harden this into a pedagogy, don’t make this a method.
Normopathy is kept at bay
The first tracing came out of frustration, could the moving width of tracing connect to autistic modes of existence without reducing them to a pathological framing? Pencil in hand, moved by and with the child’s movement. The desire to follow a trajectory, to make the world stand still, is quickly muted by interesting crossings in tentative overlaps.
Deligny refuses the reflexive pronoun self, opting for the demonstrative this, that, it. He also prefers the infinitive. Language finds itself moved by movement itself. The tracings are mappings, not maps of something. Mutate this seIf and to feel the capaciousness of a mode of existence that carries its movement with it.
The common body is not a series of persons, but a collective agitation of the field, irreducible to the one. Activator of potential modalities of sense and sensation. This is what autism does in this web. The aim is to emphasize what is lost in neurotypical forms of looking.
There is no desire to rehabilitate what gives life. Learn other ways of engaging the ecologies that compose us.
Anarchiving recognizes that the archive is not bounded. Across the living, in the act, seeds of process abound that cannot be captured. The anarchiving catches the residue in overlap, and moves with this excess.
Against method is always against language. The aim of the tracing is not to make autistic languaging intelligible, as though it could be translated. To maneuver a raft, it is necessary to adapt to the movements of the current, to become current. This is what the maps draw out.
The autistics are languaging for modes of mapping yet to be invented.
Eventually the maps dissolve, there is no more need for them.
It is not so easy to get out of our-selves. This is the power of attempts that remain tentative. What might be an art that didn’t leave traces, the trace being what exceeds, succeeds, and proceeds.
Mama Nef
I want to invite everyone to just hold yourselves right now. Hold our cells, the ones that are grieving, hurting, angry, bewildered, the ones that want to see and the ones that don’t want to see and the ones that can’t see.
Let’s call the children who are scared, who don’t understand, the ones who transitioned and are now our ancestors, the ones we have protected and the ones we couldn’t protect.
Let’s hold to the children we are. Let’s say their names.
Let’s invite the children who are yet to be born, who are in our DNA imagination. Our future teachers and caretakers Hold on to them.
Asé.
Geci Karuri-Sebina
As we continue to care for ourselves, I invite you to connect with 3 people here in the course. We are on this together. You are not alone.
Anasuya Isaacs
I am so happy you are alive, thank you for being present here and having the courage to stay present with all the uncertainty and all the unknowing and all the fear.
Our ancestors are always with us, we tend to forget about them.
This trauma, this insanity ends with us.
Be with us as we move through whatever mysteries.
Gayathri
The upside-down Vedas. Using words in trickster ways that could allow to go beyond cognitive capture.
Baba Zaheen Shah Taji:
Now, all declarative words have come to an end.
Now, there is no more need for declarative words.
Now, love is its own mission or calling!
and, love does not have a mission or calling
Everyone yearns to meet Him,
who sees both form and meaning.
But me, I’m intoxicated by the not-finding
and this, this is an unusual taste.
Kabir:
It’s just as well, my pitcher shattered–
I’m free of all that filling and hauling water,
That burden on my head is gone!
Invitations, not prescriptions. Orality asks multi sensorial immersion.This requires an unusal taste, to feel the spaces between the 2 worlds, to be less concerned about meaning and form, be intoxicated by the not finding, not landing in cognitively familiar territory.
Sometimes meaning emerges on a different timescale. Oral traditions often spans lifetimes. When form and meaning crack, we might find ourselves more available to hear and write and see.
Trudy Titilayo
Daring to face the doom that awaits, I turned to meet my monster. I hear in red the crack of a wave and see in wet it disappear.
Dancing with mountains can be disorienting confronting an unwelcome invitation to face that which we most fear. It is never safe. Our most sincere offering is companion with care, curiosity and compassion.
When next these uninvited guests appear: discomfort, confusion, disgust, sorrow, let’s take a moment to pause. Sense. Feel. Image. Place hand to heart and belly. Inhale deep. Exhale. Rest. Return to breath. Return to body. Return to heart.
We will meet you in this place.
Bayo Akomolafe
What we eat is superior to what we want to do. Yoruba proverb.
Food is not a stable object. Food is that which eats us. We are enlisted in a swirling circle of mutual edibility. I’m constantly spilling my edges, the outlines are never final, and could never be fully appropriated or represented.
When we eat plants, we are eating plant’s memories and lessons. They are eating us in return. Food is a sensorium.
Modernity is the refusal to be eaten. I’m intrigued with disgust, indigestibility, nausea. Disgust is ambivalent, it can mark boundaries of exclusion. It also marks when something new is passing. From Chronos to vomiting when a child is coming. When the new passes, it exerts a tax in the body. Is a way to sense the edges of our conditioning.
We are at the edges of our cosmovision, together. We are gesturing and trying to trace something that is not always amenable, or collapsible to articulation, to language.
Invitation to not shy away from the hurling from the vomitive.
Shahzad
The downbeat goes to the earth.
The upbeat pulls to the sky.
When the melody notes are landing with your foot unto the earth, it feels like with each new melody you are laying your body down towards the dirt, and resting.
When the melody notes are in the upbeat, there’s a feeling of a spiral going upwards.
The melody doesn’t change, it’s your perception of how the world around you affects you.
Craig Slee
Spiders wight dream.
In sleep paralysis it seems impossible to move. For some people this is terrifying.
Invitation to be aware of the gravity that you feel on your own body. You are being pulled down. Notice also that the very earth is rising up to meet you as you descend.
What if the forces watching us weren’t being and weren’t hostile? That they are just paying attention?
Pray with the cripple, those who move diagonally, with all those whose lives, love stories, songs, are proofs that there are myriad ways which exceed standing, exceed upright. There is no right way out, no right way through. All the proper protocols of distance and geometry were never meant to work for them, and they know this in their blood, and bones and gut.
To be woven by webs of weird, where we are burdened and borne by the encumbrances of our ancestors.
“The network is not about doing or making. It is devoid of anything that would serve purpose. Any excess of purpose leaves it in tatters. at the very moment when the excess of the project is deposited in it” – Deligny.
Geci Karuri-Sebina
The way we respond to different things, the content comes through in different ways. Spiders might not be your thing, we’re clapping at different times. How can we listen together when we listen and we learn so differently?
Bayo Akomolafe
Let go of the tyranny of consensus. This particular ideology forces us to think that if we are not in uniformity, if we don’t have the same ideas, if we are not arriving at the same concepts, there’s something wrong and we have to correct it. There’s something colonizing and universalist about this.
We can meet each other in the middle.
Palimpsest. Any uncomfortable gap that liberalism does not attend to. In those spaces we are already touching each other.
In what ways are we already involved? There isn’t a getting involved, we are already in this web together.
Cara Judea Alhadelf
Making the invisible visible, not through eyes, through the sensorium of relationality.
Invitation. Yoga nidra. Inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other, without using the hands. It’s a question of paying attention. What are the imbricated stories?
Step into spaces of remembering, ancient technologies, relationships that we don’t even consider relationships because they are just there.
Radical hospitality to find those places of connection.
Kay
Black loving care ethic, give from your overflow and tend to your ragedy principle.
Hope of liberation without the promise of it.
The 10000 joys and the 10000 sorrows. I’m thinking Zion is both joy and sorrow.
It’s funny how money changes situation. hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.
What it means to be a refugee. Abolition. Black feminist radicals taught us about killing the cop inside.The Gaza in me. The me in Gaza.
No more declarative words. No more need declare words. Cease fire. Please, so that our declarations are heard.
The value we put to land based on property.
The excess of screams, tears, violence. Fuck. What if I don’t want to be weaved by this web? This place of being allowed to be, there is a weaving that is happening that is resisting that, and that resistance is declaring war.
How we find each other through vibration. We are not supposed to be on the same vibe. Not everybody likes Lauren Hill.
The beauty and the horror of the downbeat. Bodies being in the bloody ground. Raise up the names of those we don’t know. Fire will never cease because I want to go out in sweetness, in tenderness, relationship is politics. My heart is what I can offer right now.
It’s not enough to stop the fire that is burning in a particular way. That is bombing in a particular way. If I’m going out, I’m going out like a fucking meteor.
What is the excess that burns beyond this world? What are the places in which the downbeat sends me to a cosmic up beat? How do I vibe with the people who know how to be in a collapsing star?
There are survivors, there always have been. The cost and the burdens of surviving. I’m grateful. Live through our dying processes, and have somebody hold our hands, bear witness. I offer a heart that is reaching. I share.
Erin Manning
John Lee Clark, deafblind poet.
For 100 years the communication between deafblind people was intervened by 2 mediators. In 2005 began the process to reach out to other deaf blind people and the protactile language started.
Distantism. Knowing that has value comes to us from our distant senses. Seeing and hearing. Touch as a debased sense comes all the way back to Aristotle. Distance is built in our idea of how we learn. It’s extremely neurotypical. Blackness also challenges neurotypicality.
Bayo Akomolafe.
Blackness is the downbeat, wants space, rushes to the center. Is it always going to be tethered to this identitarian, dominant tendency?
White syncopation is a becoming black. How we are being undone. Surplus, a debt that can’t be paid. It’s so outside of the economic order. Invitation to lose our edges.
A mass disabling event that pushes us to the ground.
Erin Manning
Parapedagogical. The 3 ecologies project. Buying land and making it a commons. Goes against every logic on investment. How to do collaborative work involves being involved in how we make and share and hoard money.
The undercommons. The problem is credit, not debt. We owe each other everything over and over again. Credit is how we and debt are imprisoned.
Acreditation. Financial capital moves through the environment of knowledge.
Parapedagogical. Challenges forms of investment.
I don’t believe in hope. It’s all about practice. Get out there and do the work.
In neurodiversity there’s a sense of confusion around time. Often we think about hope as a kind of sense of what the future can bring us.
The work is to become more and more acutely rigorous with respect to our practices
Bayo Akomolate
Hope can often become a reinstatement of the familiar. A colonization of the future.
The wholesomeness or the materiality of practice of being in a word that isn’t either hope or hopelessness. Do something that exceeds those exhausted binaries.
Stranger solidarities. Be responsible with. Stand up, prostrate, diagonalize. The politics of the third way is what is emerging.
Erin Manning
You don’t deal with slavery with hope. You build practices, you create worlds that can’t be stolen. Belief in the world, not as though it had been made already. Belief in the making.
Locate your middle. Pour libation of breath into that middle.
Locate your center. Locate you roots.
We call in the spirit of first time. The origin. The craddle of life. We call in generations of ancestors. We call in the elementals. We move forward and back. Left and right. Up and down. Moving through the center. Through the cracks.
We pause. We exhale. We breath together. Dream together. Re- create together. We regenerate together. We are one.
Asé.
Geci Karuri-Sebina
Chiasmus.
The viewpoint in Kenya. A treacherous, rickety stop, to look. Feeling of smallness and vastness. The time almost stopping. Silence, and noise from the volcano. Every time, there was something to be in awe. Something deeper than the fear of being in that platform. Something more than seeking answers.
What do you need right now? Do not fear of missing out the rest. You are safe.
Be generous to yourself and to others, because you are not on the ledge alone.
Aerin Dunford
Whatever happens here, it’s a dance. We’re playing together. Technology does what it wants, let’s dance with it.
8 breakout rooms. Drawing on the senses. Solo journal prompts. Abayomi. Chiasmus dance party. Bayo Q&A. Eldering Council. Silence and rest. Open unhosted dialogue. Mystery door.
Krista Dragomer
Drawing on the senses. Ways to be in the presence. There is nothing to get, just open interpretations. Having space, being in space, holding space.
Figure and ground relations: the identification of foreground and background. Figure is what is perceived as different from the rest. What does the edge belong to? Territories. What is contained in separateness.
Invitation to not differentiate the doing and the self that does. Close your eyes. Imagine you are barefoot at the edge of the ocean and water is touching your feet in different ways with each wave. When drawing, don’t define an edge, a territory, just make indications of presence.
Get out an object, put it where you can hold it comfortably with one hand. Draw it with touch. 3 minutes.
Now open your eyes and continue drawing, noticing what is available to you both touching and looking.
Now pass the object from one hand to the other, noticing in particular the feeling in the hand as it becomes empty. Put the object at arms length and draw the space between you and the object. Close your eyes, open your eyes, switch hands.
Now just draw the object, playing with this idea of figure and ground, softening those relations.
Quiet space for journaling with prompts for spillage.
World song
Listen for a moment where you are. Let your attention be caught by song until everything that enters your ear becomes song. What sensations does the song arouse in the body? What feelings or memories are summoned by the melody? What is the song trying to communicate? If you write about it, do not us “me”, "my’’ or “I” – write in the language of occurrences rather than subjects. If you can’t write about it, draw/trace to the beat of the song, instead.
Out there is a world of words, there’s a conversation, and a dance, and a song emerging from the encounters. Light, nourishment and water, all in abundance. Noise in abundance.
In here there’s silence. Reflection. The shelter for aloneness. In the silence, many voices feel welcome and the dance is not visible, it is just felt.
There is an inside and an outside. Warm and cold. Calm and moving. Safety and curiosity.
Syncopation.
When have you gone from marching to dancing? Perhaps you disturbed the rhythm on purpose-- what did being off-beat change in and around you? Or maybe, keeping perfect time with everyone else was impossible-- write about this impossibility and what (and who) you discovered after falling out of line. What does your dancing look like how?
There’s this drawing of a man dancing naked saying that’s how he can express his sorrow for the world. Next to him there’s his cat saying: me tenés harto hippie.
When learning in the drum circle we play with this beautiful moment at the end, a long drum roll, everybody in sync. That’s the easy part. we all have a chance to join. The tough part is that we have to end it, still in sync, with a loud dum! and laughs and satisfaction. Finish early and you break it. Finish late and you break it.
Carrier bag
Write a letter to your own future mother about the soil you will leave behind in this life. What you imagine (or already know is) growing from it. And what you would like her to gather up and have ready for you when you come back.
Use a red pen if you have one.
Hello! You know me. We have been waiting for each other in this mysterious awareness that our paths will cross in a cosmic collision. Things here are fascinating. After a lot of anger and despair at feeling lost, and after a lot of failures at taming the unknown, now I can breathe.
The failure, the mystery, the dance, that was the whole idea. You know this too. There’s been a lot of clean up to do, a lot of forgiveness to give and receive, so we find that acceptance that we are too weird and maladjusted, that the time we chose to arrive was a transition, and that after so many years, it is just now that we can start to remember.
Next time it will be different. Next time it will be the same. You and me, we will bring all these memories, we will bring all this gratitude to the ones who helped us find them, this will give us the patience necessary to breathe, be, and celebrate that we are back together.
Please make a note of this, so you can teach me again how to play with all the other critters, barefoot in the garden.
Rajna Swaminathan
Played a south indian drum.
Austin from Abayomi
In times of crises the world becomes desperate for the wisdom of oracles. Where do oracles turn in times of crises?
Oracles turn to disability to receive what ableism cannot offer. Can a disabled life be a desirable life?
If you are thinking I have something to say, seek something other than an answer. Maybe a poem. Maybe silence.
We invite you to sit with the uncertainty of telepathy, the awkwardness of silence.
Locate your channel. It can be a part of you that has been rendered disabled, that doesn’t function normally, a source of pain or discomfort or heartbreak, or even a being rendered disabled by objectification. Allow your thoughts and memories to drain from your mind. Make space without the urge to fill it with anything. Listen to that space. Imagine soft, warm pulsations of light from your channel to the water in your throat
What powerful awareness become available to you when you rest into limitation, into what cannot be, into what is but should not be. Into what you are not allowed to feel. And to places where you cannot go, and people with whom you cannot go there.
You are free from the shackles of rugged ableism. Of having to carry it alone. Of having to do it all. Of having to keep being the one that holds everything together.
Cole from Abayomi
Visual trance.
Oracles speak up.
Jay Naidoo
We are in a world falling apart. An insane grab for power. Yet how do I hold space for others. Living in a deluge of bombs and leadened death. rain. These are times of endarkenment. Despair my daily mantra. Drowning my passion and dreams. Numbed by the violence and war. Graveyards full of young ancestors. Genocided.
I am part of the becoming that has to be agreed. Let us reach deep within ourselves. We are walking the unique path of life. Sincerity our lodestar. We are re-membering. Re-birthing. We walk with courage through the hail of fire. Knowing that we are co-creating sanctuary. We are the midwives witnessing the accouchement of the New Humanity.
The drums, music, dance and prayers. Our tears of distress will fertilize the new seeds of harmony. Apathy and impunity rage on. But we are kindred spirit that fertilizes words and deeds. Attending this sacred rebirth. Courageously carrying the flag of hope with compassion.
Extra session: Falling through the cracks in activism.
Rutendo Ngara
What do in this time of crises? What is our responsibility?
Grounding. Be aware of whatever is exerting force that is close to it.
Breathe. We are aware of the moment of endless infinites. Aware of the moment of transformation that emerges. The moment of oneness, wholeness, self. The moment of divine knowledge within the universe. That is ours to know, to understand.
We continue breathing into the moment of maya, illusion, all that is disarrayed until eventually it forms itself into divine law. Truth, love, interdependence, interconnectedness, interrelatedness. Harmony.
Bring that which protects this harmony, that which creates courage within us. The warriors which seek to cut that which does not serve truth.
Inner knowing. Inner discipline, mastery, creativity, sensuality, that which opens the way. To understand what needs to be discarded.
We understand the ways of the trickster, the messenger of divine word.
We are taken into a place of the womb of the Great Mother. We call in all the ancestors, those who unite us all, the great tree of life.
Asé.
2020 was a time of unraveling. The worlds topped on it’s tracks. I cannot breathe. Oppressive systems worldwide. Collective pathologies of humanity seen on the dilated pupils of a masked society.
The times are urgent. Let us slow down.
Seeking o create new systems, new ways of working, new paradigms for the future.
The Earthrise collective. Braid the threads of activism, ancient wisdom, and alternatives into tapestry. We are part of life. Wholeness is relational.
Activism can foster meaningful engagement only if it takes time to contemplate. It is in stillness that action is born. Transformation, restoration, and regeneration can only begin from within.
Post activism. Making sanctuary is a matter of cracks, discontinuities, open to miracles, strange encounters, yawning of a monster. The flow and possibilities that proceed from the moment when things no longer forget.
Jay Naidoo
At 4 years old we were evicted from our home. We were the wrong color. 3 million black southafricans were kicked out from their home. Activism chose me. I grew up as a very angry young man. I felt inferior to white people. Everything I wanted to do was a big no. It was systemic. One big open air prison.
Steve Biko. Borne of the global activism in the sixties. France, anti-vietnam, african movements, black panther, Martin Luther King. We need a different way of living.
Black consciousness. I am proud to be black. We have nothing to lose but our chains. The mind of the oppressed is the main weapon in the hands of the oppressor.
I am in control of my own destiny. We built a movement of millions of volunteers that challenged apartheid.
Eventually I became the leader of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the backbone of the anti apartheid. Many were bombed, detained, killed.
We paralyzed the apartheid state, and created the opportunity for Nelson Mandela to come out of prison and lead negotiations. Transcend the golf between us and the white racist minority. I joined the congress with Nelson Mandela.
In 2013 things start to fall apart. The liberation movement started to eat its children. We set up a safe space in the rural Malt, Mountains, where spiritual healers were training.
Building from below and beyond borders. Suddenly we found leaders who were co- opted into the system. Inequality has grown between black and white people.
Post activism. We don’t need this big movements led by strong men. Each one of us is a little boat. We can do something in our homes, with our families, with the people surrounding us.
Find the true prophets of Africa within ourselves. Starfish. Mycelium.
Sankofa. Look at the past in order to understand our present to plan a different future.
Start to go within ourselves to understand who we are, what defines my humanity, where am I coming from, where am I going?
Lay the foundations to build people to people solidarities from below and united active citizenry.
International civil society has failed us. Along side the media, governments, businesses.
We were too arrogant as young people. We thought we could do everything ourselves. When we looked back we had left behind workers, women, unemployed, rural people. We had to create an alliance. what is the one thing that will allow us to mobilize everybody: we are fighting for the right to vote for the leader of our choice in a democratic, non racial, non sexist South Africa.
We don’t have to control each part, we know the direction.
It’s not so much about the battlefield. It’s about the battle within ourselves. We are an expression of the divine, everything, even the most evil. We are given the polarity of opposites and we can choose whether to be kind or not, tolerant or not.
It doesn’t mean we don’t fight. Because we will be called into battle. Ultimately we carry the light, we are guided by our ancestors.
There are many of the white settlers that caused many genocides that are now pushing for healing this wound of superiority and inferiority.
Arjuna is in the battlefield and Lord Krishna comes down. I cannot fight, and he was instructed that bringing the equilibrium means you have to engage those bringing the shadow. It’s energy, we are vibrations. Until we understand the oneness of that energy we would not be able to transcend the limitations of this body.
The sweetest victory you will have is the one you don’t have to fire one shot. Also be prepared to die for what you believe in. It’s a contradiction. As individuals, rise above the conflict that is thousands of years old and realize that is not our fight. We shouldn’t be killing people in the name of what our ancestors did, because the ancestors are telling us that it was wrong.
I was surrounded by Sangomas, people talking to ancestors. I didn’t try to understand that. For me it was about to win our struggle for freedom. The fight was so fierce. We were not surrounded by elders who could explain the deep indigenous wisdom of the past. We saw a ferocious enemy. Today the world is a lot grayer. How do you challenge a government that now looks like you?
Ultimately don’t try to form a movement. It’s like water that falls from the sky, hits the mountain, streams into rivers, and then the ocean. Move around obstacles, find alternative scenarios. Build the power and skills, expertise and capacity. Community work is messy, noisy, traumatic. You are going to upset someone. You can end up frustrated, disillusioned and giving up.
We are not leading anyone. Learn to shut your mouth and listen to people with your heart.
Billions of people are raising the entire family on less than a dollar a day. You are not going to teach them anything. They can teach you. Use your privilege to create the capacity to co create solutions with people that are brutalized and marginalized for many generations. Understand that is painstaking.
Immerse yourselves in the life and environment in which you are organizing. Use your skills to break down the system that keeps the majority of humanity trapped in a prison.
Keep shut. First ask the people you want to help whether they want the help. They have ideas, wisdom, experience.
The model of NGOs is wrong. They come with money and think they are going to solve problems. The people take the money knowing that the organization is going to leave. You are not a savior. Stay away from us, we don’t need you. We will find the solutions ourselves. The money collected never reaches the people it is intended to. Only 10% reaches woman This is the tragedy of civil society.
Build something new, guided by servant leadership, sankofa. Create safe spaces, sanctuary, for the chaos that is coming. Conscious people working together, independent from the broader system. Solar power, securing water, grow food symbiotically.
After many ceremonies with the sages of world I broke down. I wanted to die. Being broken gives us the opportunity to recalibrate who we are. We are carrying all that ancestral trauma. I was never able to cry. Kinsugi, the beauty of imperfection. Go within. Find a safe space. Awakening is not an easy thing. The most difficult journey you will travel is from the cesspool of the mind to the seat of the soul, your heart, where you sit with forgiveness. My biggest goal now is to cry unconditionally, because I had to be the strong person in the front. I bottled all my emotions, my shadow. I’ve been taking them out one at a time. Moksha, total liberation from samsara, the cycle of life and death, and
go back to the source.
Extra session: tracing post activism in the cracks
Anasuya Isaacs
Collective deep breathe. All divine beings, we salute you. We thank you for this circle that we are forming. Lamentation and possibility. Asé, ahó, amen.
Bayo Akomolafe.
Prayer is a gesture to the more than human, in the way a plant gestures towards the sun but never reaches it. To situate us in a world that is greater than us. So we don’t think that change and transformation is left to us, to our agency. Pray, even though we don’t have the language to frame it.
We are studying together. I have no transcendental truths to share.
White syncopation is about mistletoe
Baldur is a norse mythology god. Son of Freja. There’s a prophecy about Baldur’s death. Freja travels across the universe and extracts a promise from everything that they will not harm her son. The entire universe comes to this parliament of agreement with Baldur as the center of attention. Thus Baldur becomes impervious to feel pain.
The gods took this as a game, throwing objects at Baldur, to see if it sticks.
He’s also impervious to pleasure. He’s unable to feel the world. He wishes for his death.
Freja missed a spot, the mistletoe. She said it’s unlikely it would hurt anyone and moves away. Loki, the trickster, takes the mistletoe, turns it into a weapon, and gives it to one of the playing gods, and Baldur dies.
Baldur is emblematic of whiteness. Whiteness is not white people. It’s a sociomaterial product, we didn’t invent it. It’s roots are in the 17th century, to justify transatlantic slave trading. It needs to be impervious because it wants to preserve something. The dissociated self. Whiteness is not transcendent. It is an agreement, a sociomaterial conspiracy. If somebody decides to not follow the agreement, it becomes slightly vulnerable.
The mistletoe introduces new capacities to feel. Our politics, activisms, expectations, anticipations, are all territorial iced into whiteness. That’s why we keep producing the same things over and over again. How does change come to be?
Make sanctuary.
Fernand Deligny
A dissatisfaction with the state of psychiatric care.
In world war 2, patients and psychiatrists in Saint-Alban-sur-Ligmanole mounted an insurgency led by Francois Tosquelles.
In 1950s Deligny started a renegade project. Disability was not lack. He rejected asylum care and institutionalization of autistic children.
A cartographer of wander lines. Resistance to the primacy of language and identity. Troubled with the dichotomization of normal and abnormal.
How do we learn to live with each other in ordinary fashion. Accompany the children as they are instead of trying to fix them. They began tracing their wandering paths, making rudimentary drawings on paper. They did not interfere or try to control their movements. Subjectivity, how we move in the world, how we feel, how we sense, is not to be reduced to the subject. We are snaking lines, not points. Non-utilitarian lines. Tracing for the sake of it, as a daily practice. They could trace displacements, openings, the minor gesture.
Disabilty is generative disruption. A crack in the imperatives of institutionalized capture. The poverty of neurotypical subjectivity. Getting lost, a performative dis/humanism. A refusal to fix, explain, contain.
Mapping was not about representation, it was about living together. Making sanctuary. Post activism.
Cracks
We are exposed. We neither got rid of the wilds nor exiled the gods. We are surrounded, enlisted, moved by forces beyond our Ken. We are trans corporeal. Processes. Concatenations of relations in their liminal, open-ended inquiries.
Cracks are tensions crystallizing. Cracks break the goal. Undulating, uneven, infectious.
Cracks are everywhere around us, with/in us, queering postures. New thresholds.
Whiteness polices cracks. We need politics that attends to these cracks, experiments with failure.
Cracks are the conditions for post activism. Postactivism is the monstrous eruption of new tensions. It has no goals, no utopia. Whiteness tries to make the crack useful, it offers legibility.
Play in the cracks. Occupy the cracks. Bring something incomprehensible into the world. Accompany the monstrous.
Play & transparenting: let’s get lost in the forest.
Elder Vex
A story of falling in love with a Redwood tree, finally noticed after 30 years. What about living in areas without Redwood trees? Love enslaved matter or manufactured properties if we are to be indigenous to the land.
Quitting the compost
this notion of a transacted after life
defies nature
everything lasts forever
nothing goes away
but lingers here and now
rendered invisible in perpetuity
as a point of
civility and custom
not to crowd vision
with the sloppiness of the
multitude of plenty
ether does not
require a plain
air does not settle
as dust
it pervades
in solid determination
nothing goes
it’s all here
now and before, tomorrow
and later again.
you do not breathe your elder’s air
you breathe them
in their corporeal, existent selves
all of it
we are and they and it
are suspended -now-
as every tree
and every drift of weather
a flake of skin
is held accountable
by presence
the ocean’s divine wasteland
will not speak
to your interventions
save it or leave it to chance
it will not cease to be
any more than your
ancestors ceased to be
on the day you decided to mourn them
the atomized particles of our
evaporation will form a curtain of matter
that hangs over all
everything
everywhere
for all time.
a splinter disappears
into a whirlpool created
by the very fact of its beingness
and the weight of it’s existence
does not bring it down
never to be seen again
its fate is neither random
nor planned
or prescribed by wise men
riding glorious beasts
whose hooves
rise and fall and beat
and ultimately,
slash into the meat of
the meaning of your personhood.
that maybe you call truth
maybe you call sacred
maybe you call propulsion
may be you call nation
may be you call fatalism
may be you call desire
may be you call heat, ardor, sublime, subtext, substance,
food, fervor, manna, celebration, fluid, sap, granule, light
these opportunities to breathe
don’t come once in a life’s time
but again and again
and the desire to repeat
to become incorporated into
nature’s pattern
is what makes
other
so rejoice
or mourn
or carry on
or resign
we live we live
and we live and we live
again
Bayo Aromolate
Pied piper of Hamelin.
The town is infested with rats. They call this trickster. Ask for payment from the the king. Pulls out his flute, plays and rats follow him until they drown. Comes back to collect the payment and the king refuses. Pulls out his flute again, and this time 130 children follow him dancing outside the text. They dance beyond legibility.
Scholars found records that suggest the children disappeared from Hamelin on June the 26th, 1284.
There are many theories. The dancing plague of the 14th century, connected to hysteria. There’s a street in Hamelin where music is disallowed.
How the children where enlisted, seduced. Dancing is needed now. Minor on gesture. The unfixing of stability, of place. So subtle we don’t have a language for it. The trends of whiteness keeps us in lockstep with neurotypical tendencies of repetition. The minor
gesture is syncopating whiteness inviting us to lose our way. The seductions of music, the seductions of dance.
Raise questious about the ways we entrain children, suppress them, insist that a child is an inadequate adult. Shock and corral and contain the child within a machine of reproduction.
Many of us show up here with the pains of loss. I bow down to you.
Invitation for a different posture. Children are like cracks. Children at play within are tensions within capitalist formations of reproduction, they disturb the genealogy. We are enlisted on on what transparenting is. On what the child is becoming. Radical accompaniment.
It’s time the parents to follow, to dance away. Where is not important.
Penny Hay
Researching children as a companion. Get lost in the forest together.
Hannah McDowall
Not a mother, longed to be. In transparenting prompted by my nephews. The medicine needed is the to play, the container of adulthood would not do.
Andrew Amundson
Playgrounds were dangerous, creating playful artistic installations in Berlin. We are inadequate children.
Invitation. As children we spend creating more time creating the rules than playing. Close your digital eyes, turn off your cameras. Think back to the way we used to play as children. What is play? Where you played? What were the rules? Where you testing things. What role did your imagination play? Turn those rules into intentions, for a new game that we we we don’t know yet, that we will play together. Share your intentions with a few words. We’re going to create a waterfall with our intentions. Let the waterfall wash over us.
Penny Hay
Think about your own imagination. A puzzle that can make different words possible. We can decide together to make them real. Imagination invites potential and possibility. Exploring this liminal space between ideas and materials to make meaning. To make sense.
Children Iive in their imagination. Lead te way to play through our own imaginations. Play is research, the stuff of magic, children are researching the world as alchemists.
Ursula K. Le Guin: it is by imagination that we achieve perception, compassion, and
hope.
Imagination allows us a way in to way that our ancestors always knew. We can explore through our imaginations the betweenness we share, embracing the generative potential of emergent spaces and becoming lost together.
Imagine how a more beautiful world might emerge.
Hannah McDowall
Gifts from young people 12-17 from London. They have fear of outside.
Remember some deeply magical objects, which made the boundary between this world and the other very thin.
Farzana. A bracelet she had when she was a baby. Never really got to wear it as a child because it was kept so safe that it got lost.
Oslem. Went to an arcade and got a bunny for younger brother when he was 2. He was gone and couldn’t give him the toy. Looking at the toy now feels closer to him and empowered.
Invitation. Do you have a magical object? Spend some time with it. Or find any object that feels precious. Note down what it felt. What memories came. Say thank you to that object.
Activities in a botanical garden, get lost in a place where they felt safe. Stand up, look around, decide what to do. For example, move a glass, open the bathroom door, sniff your plant. It is your choice. Do it one action at a time.
Now complete actions, but instead of deciding what to do, look around notice what is catching your attention. Ask the object what action is it inviting you to do. Don’t rush. If you think the action is coming from you, ask the object for consent. Wait for an answer. Now act. Once complete, do it again. Say thank you to the objects.
Penny Hay
Dream in the forest. Forest is a dream, where you may find yourself, and dream is a forest where you might lose your self.
Invitation. To be in the inbetween place, invite the wilderness in, and dream with the forests. Close your eyes.
We all have a forest in our mind. We are the forest. Everything is connected in the sensations of the forest ecology. The forest is infinite and illuminating. Wonder and wander. Full of freedom and potential. Immersed in the forest we are sensitized. We tune in. Imagining solutions for alternative futures. Imagining a different world. Feel the forest, sense the spaces, be present, belong. We are the forest, we are nature, everyone is imagination.
Deep inside your mind, the forest is thinking. Dreaming, singing. Let hte imagination be wild and full of joy.
Andrew Amoudson
In the pandemics a theater in Bath closed. Let’s put a forest in it. what would it be to reimagine this space? We brought in a 5 meter tall geometry of a tree that was being overgrown by moss, with ferns everywhere. Spent time with the children in it. Work alongside with children differently, we are getting lost with children, we are finding these cracks. It’s about co-inquiry, following children’s fascinations.
The naturaI world is a powerful generator of childhood curiosity and those early sparks of imagination are often at heart of our life-long creativity.
What if you could plant a tree that would save the world? What if that tree was you?
Reframing forest from being a dark and scary place where all thess witches and goblings dwell, to a place that was welcoming, inviting, offering connection. A new model for our experience with the forest to one that is based in caring. It needs us within the space to be alive and thrive. Places for liberated learning.
Penny Hay
Invitational, negotiated, embodied. New spaces of possibilities. Responding to the affordances and materials. Thinking through making, reflecting, dreaming through assemblage and entanglement. It’s sensorial and experimental, embodied in aesthetic.
We’re inviting their wisdom and trusting their ideas.
Researching the children researching the world.
Organic and inorganic, the world of interbeing. Children are growing in this world. We learn like a meadow.
Ganavya
El juego no tiene ni reglas ni fin. La vida te da las piezas para que seas feliz y ya.
Of how the trees and the birds are my family.
Let’s go out and play.
Andrew Amondson
Indeterminate play, we find our way. We enter into a ballroom and what we find is a field of grass. Our expectations are turned upside down.
Where are we?
What is the time?
How far have we wondered?
and who we finish our rhymes?
Hannah McDowall
When invited to get lost in the botanical garden, the children refused. They suggested to do it in pairs, and recorded what they did in their phones.
Finding something for the first time feels like such a precious experience. Is it safe to share it? Will they appreciate it and understand it?
Invitation to get lost in your home. Find a different angle.
Penny Hay
Think about shimmering. What are glow moments? Where were shadows? Think about the significant moments that shined.
Nick Cave: this shimmering space where imagination and reality intersect. This is where all love and joy exist. This is the place, this is where we live.
Bayo Akomolafe
I played with my hands a lot. I would dramatize worlds by just my hands walking.
It is impossible to belong to a forest. It is live giving and life-taking edge replete with thresholds. The forest is not cute, it does not offer stable identity or stable gifts. We build islands of belongings from the chaos that is the forest. Those islands collapse under the weight of their own ambition, when belonging falls into crisis.
When the forest invades the city, what do we do?
Diversity is a form of whiteness, we still imagine bodies isolated from each other. We don’t know how to think of bodies in play. We don’t know how to think of the difference within.
How we look? How we sound? And all the forms that legitimize hierarchies of power. Even our struggles against power dynamics become power dynamics.
The forest is play. The forest is blackness. Play is the refusal for the world to be still. We are not done yet.
What do you imagine lostness to be? It’s collective experimentation at the edges of the subtle. Play is mutiny.
Instrumentality, purpose, teleology, of linear lines, paradigms of usefulness. Just play with it and see where it leads.
Lostness is taking new shapes. Even trauma and the past are not impervious to play. Children know that.
Elder Yamuna Samara
I’m going to indulge naughtiness. I play changing the words of jingle bells. First everybody unmute and blow raspberries at each other. In Tamil kusu means fart. When I pause Bayo is going to say kuso.
Radical accompaniment with each other. Play is medicine. Forest of imagination is always there, not always safe. We are all ecological beings together in this planet. Change the rules into intentions. In so doing we make a rumpus. In doing so we remember the magical things. When we play we extend time, and then the work gets magically done. Then we can sniff our plants.
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you g, my dear, and whatever is done by only me is your doing my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud) and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the star apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
Ganavya
I’ve come to the shore
I see a boat
I don’t see a boat person
I don’t know who will ferry me
over the water
How can I call out to someone
if I don’t know their name?
have I wasted all the time of my life?
will I ever learn to do good
by the time and the life given
to me?
Mother please tell me
there’s nobody here
but when can I call to survive?
Eloi Elelo (two brothers rowing)
Gedi Karori-Seb
There was news of war.
I felt very lost. I feel angry and confused in a very polarized world where there are too many truths held to no common end. Too many violences with no righteous end. Too many opinions with no beautiful end. Too much, too much, with no soul, no spirit, and no invitation to see me.
I still greet you because is my way, our way. Because I am here and you are here and I see you.
The response to Sawubona is Sawubona, we also see you. You don’t respond with an answer, you don’t respond with comfort, you reciprocate. You simply offer what you can, and what you can offer is: I see you.
Bayo Akomolafe
Welcome the tensions that travel through this course. How they texturize us. The world is volatile. If your philosophy wants to clean them up, it risks too little and gains even less. We welcome the moments when our questions have found no answers.
My aim hasn’t been to be correct. My aim has been to touch you and to be touched by you. To leave the modern conceit that we are stuck.
How do you wrap things up, find conclusion and resolutions?
Phototropism: when the stem of a flowering plant gestures toward the sun, but never finally touches it. In it’s struggle it becomes other. It’s impossible to be indifferent in such a universe.
Our responses are framed within a classically humanist framework, to a post-humanist world. A world that exceeds the empirical. A world constantly shifting to our moral purviews. We reduce our accountability and responsibility to either denunciation or approbation, which emerges from the conceit human exceptionalism that we can rise above nature and govern the tide of things. That it’s left to us to address the situation. And that if we’re not doing anything about it, then we are marked by the sin of indifference. A failure.
Reframe responsibility. Being in-different. Acknowledging the complexity of the world. An invitation to a different aesthetic.
“Everything I’ve worked on comes down to the simple sentiment of be nice”. I don’t think so, being nice and being good can obscure being sensuous.
There is a lot that the empirical is unable to analyze. Our rush to remove the symptom of suffering and save the day risks the continuity of the patterns that created those situations. Being indifferent is impossible in an entangled universe.
It’s not an invitation to don’t be kind. It’s to notice that it is limited.
War is the ritual that leads to the explosion. The everyday matters, the greeting matters.
Parallax is the apparent displacement of the location of an object from the perspective of the displaced observer. Like if you are in a moving vehicle, the trees are going a lot faster than the buildings in the background, and these are faster than the mountains in the background. With trigonometry, and the distance between their eyes, astrologers measured the distance between the stars. We need displacement, movement, to locate ourselves.
Modern subjectivity is the presumption that we are still. We will only find ourselves when we stick to how things are crawling. We will be dancing with the invisible that gives birth to the visible, with differencing and displacement that gives birth to placement.
Jordi Rosales.
Marcel Marceau catching butterflies.
His mime practice started during the holocaust. He learned from giving direction quietly as part of the french resistance, smuggling children.
How do you see what’s not there? How do we see what is before us in this impossible images, how do we be with these impossible times?
There is a third that is created when you focus on the space.
In miming you are showing what you are seeing, and you have to let that thing penetrate you, you have to become it a little bit.
Invitation. First just practice stillness. A helpful lie, a presence to softening and to quiet. Put your thumb in front of your face. Look at it. Move closer and further. Leave your thumb in one position, try to lock your eyes into that position, and then move your thumb. Your eyes will be a little crossed and the back will be blurry. Now you are looking front of at something in front of you.
Next you will have to embody what you are looking. Grab the butterfly with your thumb and finger, and flap the hand. Now release the butterfly and watch it as it flies.
See your butterfly whenever you need to, a helpful friend as we move through these impossible times. We need impossible allies. Take care of each other, see the invisible together.
Bayo Akomolafe.
What appears obscures the connections with the sensuous. We invest energy in what we see and lose sight of the potency of the invisible. It’s only through the invisible that we become different.
Samora Roberto Abayomi Pinderhughes
Plays a song about cyclical relations.
Another about processes, an open-ended conclusion of the universe.
Penelope Barquero
Part of Abayomi.
Invitation. Lose the posture. We are slowing down
Try your best posture, the one that carries your message across the room, the one that holds up the stories you chose to live by, even when they don’t work anymore, the one that allows prompt regurgitation of teachings and understandings the one that portrays you as fair, revolutionary, innovative, a post activist 100% trendy, the non-exhiled posture.
Now switch from holding up into falling. Free our head from always attempting to defeat gravity. Disable the human mode that shapes us into postures to survive in the anthropocene plantation. Can we lose our postures we adopt to belong in this circle, the ones we use to formulate smart questions. Take a deep breath.
Let gravity pull you down. If it’s hard to let go of the mask, help with your hands. Let gravity show you different ways of falling. Surrender. We are not meditating! We are not doing breath work. We are not making sense of this. We are just falling.
What if surrendering to gravity is the most ideal way to pray.
When you cannot fall anymore, can you simply be there? Be less human for a few moments. There is only feeling, pulsing, fluids and organs discovering a new way.
Gratitude, Rub your body. Imagine the force of life’s hands, reminding you of motion, reinhabiting your amazing body, fleshy, soft, strange, shape-shifting. Note others in our space, notice a flow of self-compassion, collective compassion.
Now that your head is rested, how might your body want to assume a different shape? Are there more than human presences cleared by the surrender to gravity? What impossible images are with and through you?
Bayo Akomolafe and Orland Bishop
Breath together.
The transatlantic slave trade as a rite of passage.
What we are in touch with? what we might touch and what might touch us? We are not alone.
Spiritual bypassing. Use spiritual platitudes and truisms to avoid responsibility and accountability. Avoiding pain that deepened suffering.
It’s now used as an accusation when we veer away from a standardized model.
I am a potential for spirit. It prepares context for my own becoming. Have a constant awareness of prophecy, the potential of fulfilling something that is not yet even real.
Everyone will have a personal experience of spiritual phenomena because we cannot avoid it. Avoidance leads to another kind of opportunity that might be more radical. Life cannot be avoided.
It’s often the case that what we term avoidance might be sidestepping the logic of economy relations that incarcerates us in patterns of repetition.
We are wanting more than a cease of fire, we are wanting sensuous departures.
Language constitutes realities of understanding and intentionalities for creating. Our language structure predetermines the levels of intuition. This process remains to agree in more complex realities. We could scale our consciousness to higher levels and include realities that are not yet recognized by sense perception.
The world construct upon which we have built our mind is avoiding responsibility for higher grammars, higher agreements. This is the end of agreement structures that have locked so much human potential into a constant repetition of self-betrayal, a war against the self. This is no longer reality, this is insanity, there is no justification for choosing this kind of violence.
We are not reducible to the empirical, to sense knowledge.
God is the universe and also exceeds the universe.
Blackness is wrong grammar. Interrupts the purity of the sentence and invites other kinds of construction. The radical hospitality of blackness.
Darkness is disrupting because people are living in realities far more complex than modernity. Physical life will ultimately change because light, and love, and life, keeps flowing to it from other sources.
One does not speak wisdom straightforwardly. It comes through the glitch.
Attention is the recovery of primordial energy. It’s what we have as infants, it’s a spiritual activity. We will come back to the grammar that says we shouldn’t stay in this reality. Nature sees us, the stars see us, can we give them the same attention?
How are you moved by this? Hold it as a gift.
Molly Brown
Be water
that is the plan in the Hong Kong resistance
flow through streets, leaderless
emergent, responsive to the moment
impenetrable to infiltrators
be water
the stuff left in plastic jugs in border lands
for comfort and salvation of those seeking refuge.
be the sweat of those who leave the jugs
be the moisture forming at the point of contact
with the handcuffs
be water
be the dew formed at sunrise
on the spider web
a shinning mandala of beauty and survival.
be the steam
rising at the edge of the lava bed
the insistent creation of new land
in this time of decline.
be water
be herbal tea for healing
the sick and the hopeless
be the blood of the one
offering the cop in an
outstretched hand
be the one in the bed, loved.
be the iv fluid
restoring balance the emergency
until things change back
until the body remembers
be water
be the unapologetic tear
of grief
or gratitude
be the storm
be fury and change and unpredictable
uncovering of the predicament we are in
be the tide, breathing in and out
reminding us of the daily fullness
and slack of life,
the rhythms of the universe in our bodies
be the river, on dammed,
welcoming the salmon
be the rain
be the silence before the rain
the rivulets after, seeking the parched
be water
be the blessing of baptism
no matter your faith
the drops of water landing with love
on the newly born
be the amniotic fluid
holding safe, with or without hope,
the future
because it’s there any way
in the fragile sac of becoming
The sounds of revolution will not be composed in the convenient strains of harmony. I will erupt, cacophonous from the cracks.
There is something about emancipation that is driven by sound. Stay with those syncopated sounds as we transit to other places of inquiry and collective experimentation.
[Plays a video of drumming from Ghana.]
Some things shouldn’t be fully captured. We embrace the glitch.
Resmaa Menakem
The gurgling and sloshing of creation, and the solidity at the same time. Potentiality and resonance.
We are part of something that does not have to necessarily always have an answer or remedy. Sometimes we get fooled into thinking that the audience for our engagements
are the corporeal bodies that are in front of us, and not our ancestors, or our children’s children’s children’s children.
Geci
Karoo is a semi-desert in South Africa. 30 years ago I wouldn’t have been allowed to be in this room. The portraits on the wall tell me that. Why am I here?
Ih the Riff Valley my people call one of the mountains the mountain of the devils. Several people claim to have seen the devil riding a motorcycle in the crater. There’s also people living there. Who chooses to in a devil infested crater?
I hope you feel welcome in whatever crack you are occupying.
This is the final session, and we are calling for openings, so I don’t know if I’m coming or going.
Kyle Page
From Dance North.
An invitation to dance together. Simply allow the words to wash over you.
Opening the soul to Mother Earth, know that she speaks through you. Deep respects for elders, wisdom teachers, knowledge holders of the past. Acknowledge your body. Give your body whatever it needs for the next 20 minutes. Know that your body is a reflection of all the bodies, entangled together.
Bayo Aromolate
Reframing of prophecy. A reconvening of time. Time is queer. The modern is just a linear performance of this thing we call time. Prophecy is the invitation to look again, a network of collective care in very charged times. Gathering the past and future and present, and mixing it playfully. Crossroads. There’s no finality at the crossroads.
We went to the first European settlement in Ghana. A castle that was the architecture of oppression and slavery for Africans, that were taken through the door of no return. There is a burden that I feel, I’m still processing the energies of going into the dungeons. Held 1000 men in 5 chambers. No air, no light, a place of no place, placeless, beneath the surface. They would be locked until they were sold. The ones who aggressively refused were taken into the torture chambers.
I sat alone in the darkness with the bodies of my fathers and my uncles. I cried and started to sing, wanting my voice to travel across space time.
Wade in the water children don’t you know that God’s gonna to trouble the water.
I felt joy. An alien thing that met me in such a suffering place.
There was an anglican church but on top of the dungeons to indoctrinate the people beneath. They had constructed the dungeon in order to preserve the legibility of the surface. Modernity is about this place making to preserve the integrity of the surface. Now that surface is in trouble, that surface is on fire. There isn’t a place to run. This orisha that is burning the surface, a trouble entity we call anthropocene, climate collapse. Those dungeons have become a potential for making sanctuary together.
We will descend into places that will look like caves. The work of making sanctuary will not be done on the surface. We will have to go underground. The place of regeneration.
Mostafa Sheta was disappeared in Palestine, the dungeons didn’t disappear.
Take my heavy words with light feet. We are just beginning this work together. Stay here in the underground together.
We meet each other, we call each other, we gather.
The world is an opportunity for sensuous mutiny, a slave ship could become a configuration of bodies traveling to creolize the world. A dungeon could become sanctuary.
Krista Dagomer
A drawing exercise to hold space. Draw your head.
Draw with whatever hand you like. Draw it as if it’s a place never explored before. The explorer is your hand. See if we can let our hand be alien to your head. Maybe this hand creature-collective-organism has capacities to land on the surface and see into the interior.
See the vastness, let it be small, let it be large, sense the darkness and mystery. Close your eyes and draw until the song is over.
It’s impossible to move without drawing, we leave traces all the time.
Jordi Rosales
In what ways we have failed in this course? What are the things you wish you had said and couldn’t come out? Who is your support structure going forward? What are your alliances? What are the places, gestures, kinships that are emerging to support you to continue with what is moving here? How do you administer your medicine to your helpers to make it a reciprocal gesture?
Bayo Akomolafe
The awkward is not a loss of grace. It’s when there’s too much grace.
Immanuel Wilkins
Improvisation at the piano and sax.
Sofia Batalha
Offer the sheer potency and the slower geologicaI time of valleys. Move with fierce tenderness.
Yeyo Beltrán
Offer the space for the new to emerge, in the soil of the compost.
Pooja Kishinani
Space to witness and be witnessed.
Fabrice Dubosc
May awkwardness lead us to places of comfort and discomfort trough the intensity of the minor.
Erin Manning
Be in the failing together. We are thaught that things only matter if they are infinite, so they have to become institutions and recognizable, and play by the rules. Be in the uncertainty of new orientations.
Geci
Being lost and fully enjoying it.
Jordi
You see yourself in all of us, you see yourself in the world. We see ourselves in you too.
Aparna Bakhle
Fail together, fail more. Witnessing the initiatory moments that emerge from our convening. playing together in tricky territories.
Aerin Dunford
The time of the valley is different than the time of the mountain. The current rundown will take us to this place of sanctuary together.
Geci
Libation. A ritual space where we make an offering and ask for a blessing. A way to spiritually bind us together. A way to exercise the creative power of our voices. Speak into being. Asé.
Mama Nef
Gratitude for the ancestors that have gone before, the ancestors yet to be born. For the music that you are. For the harmony and the discordant notes. The rhythm and the falling out of rhythm. Asé.
Elder Molly Brown
Wish you all find sanctuary in the trees and plants, with your ancestors who are here to guide you, and with the future beings who are coming with the blessings we leave for them. In the rivers, in the water in your body. They are one, they flow together. Asé.
Elder Yamuna Sangarasiram
May we find love and Grace. Make connection with our heart beat. Listen and feel deeply. Beat in in so many rhythms All our hearts connected. Ecosystems of plant life, water life, wind life, earth life.
Surrendering all of our fears to the sun. Surrendering all of our anxieties to the moon. Washing away all of our regrets in the ocean. Continuing to play with so many butterflies. Asé.
Rutendo
We pour libation. We have danced upon the mountain, we have stood firm, strong and elevated as we’ve opened the cracks through our kinship. Others have stood on our peaks, our slopes, our rugged exteriors. They remain steady, they remain rooted.
We have stood firm with the knowledge of billions of years, we sought authenticity, clarity, vulnerability. We stood firm in the seasons, through the shifts of winds, hurricanes and storms,rainbows, sunshine and snow.
We have journeyed into the unknowing, unlearning, undoing.
We the dancers are the mountain. We have stood in stillness, sturdiness, rootedness. We, whose caves in which all lives have taken shelter, as the crevices and cracks, pathways for volcanoes, we who have protected against the ill winds.
With the valley at distance below, filled with all manners of nourishment, all the grains, the leafy greens, four-leggeds, swimmers, crawlers, all the winged ones that have landed with us.
We who have emerged through the dark, through the disruption, the creaky connection, the joy us grief. Protectors of the valley whose shadows have been illuminated as we have stood close to the sun.
We pour libations to the dance of time. We breathe together, dream together, see together, recreate together, renew together, regenerate together, heal together, rekindle together. We are the dancers upon the mountains. Asé.
Elder Vex
An irony to smile at. My spirit guide is a comet that died 1 billion years ago, yet still circles the universe, on fire, flushing, gurgling. Asé.
