Bayo Akomolofe: Our Entangled Mess

Zeitgeist with Zack Geist

In this episode, Zack Geist and Bayo Akomolafe engage in a dancing of words around the constantly changing issues of these queer times of Spring 2020. Akin to flies they find themselves tangled in the spider's web, a sensation both uncomfortable and familiar, they attempt to feel their way towards something just out of reach. Energized by the exhausted common narrative Zack and Bayo explore the realm that is inhabited by the invisibles as though they may have been listening all along. They invite you to join them on the edge of where fact and fiction breed and birth the myths that shape the lens of our times.

Bayo Akomolafe is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action, activism and social change. He is an international speaker, poet and activist for a radical paradigm shift in consciousness and current ways of living. His readings of ‘knowledge’, ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘truth’ as Eurocentric metanarratives led him and his wife, Ej to develop the first International Workshop on Alternative Research Paradigms and Indigenous Knowledge Promotion (WARP, 2011). Bayo is a member of the advisory board of the Real Economy Lab (UK). In 2014, and was awarded for Global Excellence Award [Civil Society] by Future Shapers (California). He is the Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project) [www.emergencenetwork.org], and host of the online writing course, ‘We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’. He hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crisis of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify. Bayo has authored two books, We Will Tell Our Own Story! and These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home.