We will Dance with Mountains

Organised around the postactivism of Dr Báyò Akómoláfé, ‘Dancing with Mountains’ is a course/carnival of learning for those who believe that the present times call for unprecedented forms of organisation, bold new thinking in the direction of ‘exquisite formulations’, and a form of coming together that emphasizes that people are not reducible to their jobs. 

The course includes lectures by Dr Akómoláfé, teachings by revered guests, dance, cooking together, eating together, play with children, making sanctuary, exercises, one-to-one encounters, weaving rituals, gatherings and creating new assemblages of power. 

Described as ‘an aesthetics of the endtime’, the course is an exploration of Dr Akómoláfé’s ‘postactivism’ as a pragmatic politics of rethinking accountability, social justice, and responsivity in the ruins of modernity. It is not a course premised on gaining mastery or getting to the point, but ‘an unspeakable travelling together from points-of-no-return, an ungrammatical vocation’ of walking into failure, a falling-apart-together, a fugitive ethnographic study of the hidden worlds lurking behind white sight, a decoration of the walls of the cracks, a cultivating of bewilderment together. 

The course introduction invites would-be participants to a carnival of departure in teaching, creating together, and leaning into the exquisite:

 ‘We Will Dance with Mountains is an animist carnival-festival, a subterranean convergence of disarticulated bodies desirous of a new politics, and a cartography project set upon exploring vast terrains of failure as a gesture of refusal in a time when resistance not only feels inadequate to the task of decoloniality but programmatically linked to the continuity of the status quo.’ 

 Session offerings include: 

- A trans-local community of 1500-2000 fellow students, artists, teachers, others, midwives, children, elders, wanderers and otherwise from across the planet weaving a rich tapestry of cross-cultural inquiry and possibilities; 

- Regional meet-ups where possible; 

- Specific agoras for Black folks, People of Colour, and White-identified people; 

- Artist collaborations; 

- Music, dance and theatre; 

- Prayer 

- Emergent curriculum.

Website

Keywords: Postactivism, social justice, modernity, whiteness, accountability, fugitive ethnographies, animism,

festival, gatherings, learning, decoloniality.

Links to wellbeing economy: Modernity, whiteness, decoloniality, failure, cross-cultural inquiry