Never has it been clearer to us why creativity and innovation is so important for our planetary wellbeing. Revolutions will get rid of kings but not the furnitures of oppression. Our reality revolves around a toxic loop, to find our way therefore, we must first become lost, we must seek the glitches, the slippages and the cracks. Where then should we gather to rehearse the final bow? Who are the allies for this planetary breakdance? Who are the future architects designing the spaces to collectively rehearse the future now? To rehearse the breakdance of our time - the dance that breaks, and the breaks that produce new dances - which unsettles us to gain embodied insight into the workings of our world. A novel way of articulating culture perhaps, that isn’t treating our bodies as commercial billboards, national flags nor battle grounds, but if our bodies are sensors, what they sense is that things will get worse before they get better.
Transformation is messy, because pushing power out to the edges introduce more randomness into the system. The way to make sense of a chaotic world is to work more together, to keep weaving together bodies, forms and realities that seem to be separate and unconnected. If the middleground is a place, if the middle of chaos is a place, if being at the crossroad is a place, if endless crisis and complexity is a place, if not knowing is a place, if being at the edge is a place, if being on the spectrum is a place, if the moment of falling and screaming without inhibition is a place, then gathering on own terms is a fugitive technology for navigating the middle of nowhere.
There are several fundamental concepts that are distinctive to Yorùbá aesthetics, its capacity to weave together opposing forms and realities, provide a foundation for comprehending the dynamics of art and society, and for making kin with all human and non-humankinds in the cosmos. When art inhabits such spirito-spacio-temporal reality, the result is never tranquil but mobile and active, even aggressive. It is the striving to come to terms with a multitude of forces and demands that give life its tense and restless dynamism, and its art an outward, social, and kinetic quality.
Our gathering bodies aren’t looking for ways to solve the crises, they are not aiming to treat chaos as an anomaly, but to compose them into a choreography, to realise that we are in a different time and place all together, when new senses are becoming available. To realise that when the earth quakes, new kinds of thinking bodies are birthed in flight. To realise that the cracks and the open sores are portals for different kinds of bodies, minerals and monsters. To realise that the enemy of our ancestors are also our ancestors. To realise that we all have inherited all the worlds pasts and futures, all the worlds riches and messes. What matters is what we do with them and offer as inheritance to our collective unborns. To realise that the slippages are access codes for new knowledges. Wisdom is what remains at the end of everything we know.
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