About this Event
Critic-in-Residence Lecture Series: Dr. Bayo Akomolafe — \cracks\
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Lecture + Q&A 7:00-8:30 pm
The Forum, Elaine and Bram Goldsmith Campus
Free and Open to the Public
Space is limited. Please RSVP via Eventbrite to reserve an on-campus seat.
This lecture is presented by the Otis College Fine Arts department. Follow Fine Arts on for the latest news, events, and more!
About \cracks\
The Anthropocene enjoins immediate action to address the increasingly viable prospects of an end to life on the planet. However, agency is popularly framed as a force domiciled within individuals and human collectives - within traditional, liberal notions of the isolated self. When we shift our gaze from looking at things so squarely, so straightforwardly, and begin to deploy peri-feral/autistic visions of migrant bodies and porous boundaries, then agency becomes less individuated and more ecological and territorial. /cracks/ are a phenomenon of these territorial tensions, subterranean intensities, and wandering lines. /cracks/ are powerful political constituencies that tell a story of how transformations often occur and why things often remain the same despite our best efforts and intentions.
\cracks\ are frightening forces and transversal opportunities for cultivating new sensibilities in the 'Afrocene'. \cracks\ 'exist' as potencies and tensions in the fabric of the familiar. They invite something more than seeking solutions, enacting justice, or seeking victory over one's enemies. They invite a postactivism that leans towards more risk-taking ventures and unprecedented ways of addressing today's crises.
In this lecture, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe conjures \cracks\ as invisible geo-politico-theo-socio-material allies, and calls for a planetary, trans-local art project that leans on the potency of \cracks\ to transform and shapeshift our body-minds. The pedagogical work of staying with/in cracks is what Dr. Akomolafe names as "ch(i)asmagraphy", which he thinks of as "new attempts" in the visionary cartographic spirit of Deligny to accompany the "monster" away from the status quo. With stories from his Yoruba cosmology, his experiences as a father to an autistic boy, and his diffractive readings of blackness as a counterhegemonic force, Bayo Akomolafe retells the story of the Anthropocene in a weird, strange, and generatively incapacitating way.
About Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
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 and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Local 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 Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. Learn more about at https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00