Visiting Professors: Bayo Akomolafe – The crack is not a door: on disarchitecture, aqueous sites, and the afrocene
Posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher Bayo Akomolafe will visit the Academy of Fine Arts and Puistokatu 4 in August and September.
Cracks are not openings we can choose; they are not entrances we step through with intention. Cracks are para-ontological, ecological and retrospective – speculatively composed only after the fact, in the slow material churning of what I have come to call the paraterranean. This lecture wonders what it might mean to think site differently: as aqueous, as paraterranean, as the granular groan of sedimentation working itself out. Across the Afrocene, disarchitecture, and the speculative geologies of the crack, I will sit with the question: what does it mean to make art at sites that refuse to be sites? And what becomes of the ’responsive’ in site-responsive practice when the site itself is leaking, listening, churning, and unfinished?
About 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 EJ, son and brother. He is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and currently the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025).
Bayo is the host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, an educational consultation and the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene.
Accompanying lecture 27 August at Puistokatu 4
Before the lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Akomolafe will also be speaking at Puistokatu 4 on 27 August about hope.
Cracks are not openings we can choose; they are not entrances we step through with intention. Cracks are para-ontological, ecological and retrospective – speculatively composed only after the fact, in the slow material churning of what I have come to call the paraterranean. This lecture wonders what it might mean to think site differently: as aqueous, as paraterranean, as the granular groan of sedimentation working itself out. Across the Afrocene, disarchitecture, and the speculative geologies of the crack, I will sit with the question: what does it mean to make art at sites that refuse to be sites? And what becomes of the ’responsive’ in site-responsive practice when the site itself is leaking, listening, churning, and unfinished?
About 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 EJ, son and brother. He is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and currently the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025).
Bayo is the host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, an educational consultation and the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene.
Accompanying lecture 27 August at Puistokatu 4
Before the lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Akomolafe will also be speaking at Puistokatu 4 on 27 August about hope.