Learning Curve

"That morning, we were joined by Yoruban author, educator, and self-described "trans-public intellectual" Báyò Akómoláfé. Akómoláfé had given to us a challenge, a seed to sprout a lively conversation: How do you locate the body in multispecies arrangements? . . . How do you locate the body within cybernetic algorithms? How do you locate the body within spiritual, archetypal, socio-material, political, economic, gastronomical, hierarchical, racialized assemblages? [ laughter] . . . How do you locate the body any longer if it seems we are all connected?"

"Akómoláfé's nimble ideas and playful storytelling challenged us to think collectively beyond the body, around the sensorium, and into the virtual as we toyed with concepts like the capacity of the "monstrous"to creatively irritate normativity. Together, we touched on divinity and dreaming as forms of alterity; neuroplasticity and the porousness of subjects and environments; and the fertile gaps appearing in the facade of the architecture of colonization."

An online May 2024 gathering of the Postnatural Independent Program convened international participants to interrogate the location of the body across diverse assemblages. Questions centered on bodies in multispecies arrangements, within cybernetic algorithms, and embedded in spiritual, archetypal, socio-material, political, economic, gastronomical, hierarchical, and racialized systems. Explorations moved beyond embodiment to the sensorium and virtual realms, invoking the concept of the "monstrous" as a creative irritant to normativity, divinity and dreaming as alterity, neuroplasticity and porous subject–environment boundaries, and the fertile gaps in colonial architecture that might liberate thought, molecules, relations, and actions.

Read at Artforum