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Bayo Akomolafe: Workshop - The Times are Urgent, Let us Slow Down

How we respond to the crisis is very often a part of the crisis. And solutions are sometimes the problems way of masking its desire for continuity.

We now live in the age of the Anthropocene. What that means is that we are experiencing the shock of meeting ourselves for the first time. We are not only seeing how consequential human activity is to the planet we call home, we are also noticing that the traditional boundaries that separated us from the environment and from nonhumans are not as definite as we thought they were. In short, we are seeing that we are indeed monstrous, composite, entangled, spread out and mangled up. This changes everything. Justice, self, race, activism, victory, humanity, equality, time, progress and the future not one of these seemingly fundamental categories is left untouched or un-queered by the rippling effects of the realization that we are entangled with the world.

Riddled with storytelling sessions, expository talks, unusual exchanges between participant and environment, and other liminal rituals, this workshop is a call to the humble and difficult work of noticing other worlds, and to the tender field left in the wake of understanding that there are no solutions. Grounded in Bayo Akomolafes concept of postactivism, and held in a collective action-driven process of shared inquiry and sense-making called kwilting, this workshop will enchant your vision, animate your environment, and help awaken you to the sensuous possibilities often dismissed in our quests for convenient resolutions. For activists, conscientious actors, policy makers, educators, artists and humans mostly. Come see with new eyes, and understand why though the times are urgent, we can slow down.