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.

We Will Dance with Mountains is an aesthetics of the endtime, an exploration of Dr. Akomolafe’s postactivism as a pragmatic politics of rethinking accountability, social justice, and responsivity in the ruins of modernity. This is not a course premised on gaining mastery, getting to the point, achieving consensus, healing trauma, winning enlightenment, speaking truth to power, raising consciousness, or building on progressive ideals. This is an unspeakable traveling together from points-of-no-return, an ungrammatical vocation in becoming crippled together, a walking into Dunbar Creek together, a falling-apart-together, a tracing of new lines of errancy, 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, and a sitting-together-until-something-happens.

Since 2015, inspired by Yoruba indigenous ways of knowing and a coterie of concepts nurtured by posthumanist philosophies, ‘Mountains’ has convened study around potent issues, calling together an mbari* of artists to rehearse new postures and gestures that coincide with the thresholds and hidden publics of the Black outdoors. A worldwide community of inquiry, an ecosystem of interlinked practices, and a village of technologies has emerged. We call this village, ‘Vunja’ – a Swahili word for ‘dancing in the breaks.’ In its sixth iteration, the ‘course’ seeks to nourish this planetary federation of postactivist practitioners, to articulate a political project premised on mutiny, not arrival. Non-legibility, not visibility. Our ambition is to weave together an erotic network of cartographic work and engender flourishing creativities and capacities in the wooden hull of modern tensions.

We Will Dance with Mountains is a carnival of departure in teaching, in creating together, in leaning into the exquisite, in texturing exile, in re-membering with the places that hold us, in making sanctuary. Hundreds of people from across the world, with different cosmovisions and persuasions, gather to lean into the cracks, to try new moves, to revisit the ordinary, to stray generously from the assured.   

This project - should you find your way to it - is your permission to fail.

The course will include lectures/talks by Bayo Akomolafe, teachings by revered guest teachers, dance, cooking together, eating together, play with children, making sanctuary, exercises, one-on-one encounters, regional meetups and local gatherings of practice, musical and theatrical performances, weaving rituals, gathering together, and creating new assemblages of power together.