Cost: Sliding Scale $500, $375, $250
We are anticipating this retreat drawing a large group of interested participants. In order to ensure a wide diversity we are asking people to apply. The application is below. We will respond on a rolling basis.
When a Yoruba trickster god or Òrìshà refused to stave off the troubling incursion of white slavers during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, he inadvertently creolized the planet, opening out virtual possibilities in the closure of the known. It is said that the one called Esu Elegba travelled with the slaves instead of attempting to rescue them. Perhaps in the eyes of the pantheon, in the mythopoetic eyes of history, Esu failed. But failure has hidden purposes that the violent regimes of the visible know nothing about.
In this retreat, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe draws from his Yoruba indigenous insights to tell a story about these times; in so doing, he imagines emancipation, decoloniality, and the work of crafting a vibrant, end-of-time materiality of care through the topography of failure. By treating failure, disability, and the destabilizing syncopations visited upon white stability as a form of generative incapacitation, Dr. Akomolafe invites us to convene at the sites of our greatest vulnerabilities – for it is there that we might take on new shapes.
This retreat is about Akomolafe’s concepts such as postactivism, ontofugitivity, slowing down, the Afrocene, becoming-black, and the work of abtherapy.
Facilitator Bio:
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. Learn more at www.bayoakomolafe.net and www.emergencenetwork.org
Main Image Credit: Laolu Senbanjo