Selah: An Awkward Grace – An Online Course Exploration and In-Person Retreat

SELAH: An Awkward Grace

An Online Course Exploration and In-Person Retreat

Hosted by Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
Additional Faculty: Krista Dragomer

Online Course: February 25, March 4, March 11, March 22
In-Person Retreat: March 29 – April 1

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

 

A Note from Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

 

About 42,000 years ago, the planet Earth experienced a reversal of its magnetic poles. With virtually no magnetic shawl shielding her from devastating solar winds and cosmic radiation, the planet’s ionized atmosphere blistered, sizzled and hissed with electrical storms that rendered life on the surface intolerable. In what atmospheric scientists have named “Adams Event”, climate change, migrant auroras, and ultraviolet radiation were among the transitional effects that marked the vanishing of megafauna in Australia and Tasmania and the extinction of Neanderthals. The telltale fingerprints of this devastating earth moment are still tattooed on the rings of kauri trees recently excavated in New Zealand. Some of our human ancestors would have found their situation “incredibly scary” and would have been motivated to seek shelter anywhere they could to escape the storms. One of the oldest caves in Europe, El Castillo, may have hosted people on the run. Researchers feel confident that Adams Event precipitated the vast migration of human populations into caves like El Castillo because the sudden eruption of cave art around the world coincides with the pole flip upheavals.

In a sense then, at a time when the planet shuddered with an irrepressible fever, with a deathly silence and pestilence that cast its irradiated gloom over undulating lands, a strange vocation took root: an unspeakable art project composed of natural pigment, blood, oil, animal fat, spit, red ochre, twigs, horsehair, and a fugitive hope.

This making-together in the electrical storms of upheaval is what I call ‘Selah’. Selah is the name I give to the moment when the air is alive with other tendencies, when normal perception is scalded by a fierce passing, by an eruption of sorts. I think of these eruptions as grace. Grace is the breach of the normal, a postponement of the usual moral tensions that hold us captive to one another. However, Selah describes the potentialities within the blast radius, and names the softening of the materials of ‘the real’ such that even breathing is rendered provisional, experimental, and tentative.

I borrow the term from the ethnomusicological considerations of the Jewish concept of the same name, which is ambiguous and has had no fixed definition to scholars interested in the 74 times it shows up in the Tanakh. More than just a word for ‘contemplation’, ‘raise it louder’, or ‘take a breather’ (as has been recommended by those who suggest that the term Selah was used as a musical notation to tell musicians in the old palaces where they were to relax and pause), Selah’s striking ambivalence seems fitting to the appearing of something ‘greater’, something that derails convenient continuity. Selah shows up as a figure of impermanence, of not-knowing, of radical discontinuity. An apophatic mark that means that saying more doesn’t really bring more to the table.

Selah is the immediate environment of the monster, the awkward grace of irruption. The burning bush that urges us to approach with caution. To not say anything. To wait a bit longer. It is also a politics of radical hospitality. Of accompaniment. Of generative incapacitation. Selah is the call of grace to make art at the edge of the world. At the end of the world.

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ABOUT

In collaboration with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe / Dancing with Mountains and Ayin Press, we offer a short course exploration, and an in-person retreat called ‘Selah’. Selah is a series of retreats crafted around Dr. Akomolafe’s thesis that contemporary times call for something more than healing, justice, resolution, or solution. The core invitation of Selah is to make art together, to test the limits of normal perception, to interrogate the peri-feral where representation fails to carry its weight, and to amplify desirous lines and minor gestures that are alive as potentials in the air. Our explorations into how we encounter this invitation in the sensorial, in gestures and forms of material exploration will be facilitated by Dancing with Mountains Artist-in-Residence Krista Dragomer. Garrison Institute is pleased to host the first in the series of these Selah retreats.

 

THEMES

VIRTUAL

***You will be emailed a link to the course a few weeks before the course begins***

 

February 25, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET): A Shared Story of ‘Experience’: With the ideas of the posthuman, parapolitics, and ontofugitivity, Dr. Akomolafe explores a cosmic tale that reframes experience as a more-than-human biopolitics that has a shape. Dr. Akomolafe explores perception as a material shackle that holds us in service of dominant values and explores what it might take to break off from them.

March 4, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET): Grace is a Monster: Distinguishing between morality and ethics, Dr. Akomolafe examines the monster as a figure of breaks and fissures, an eroticethical failure of moral patterns. He believes that cultivating relations with the monster scratches grooves into the embroidered fabric of experience, allowing new kinds of sensitivities and openings.

March 11, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET): Making Sanctuary Together: What does care look like at the end of the world? The themes of descent, blackness and the carnivalesque, imagination, and the limitations of justice, harm and safety, are examined to develop a geo-philosophy of making sanctuary together.

March 22, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET): Bring Something Incomprehensible into This World! Responsibility is always experimental, always speculative, never fully resolved. In this final online session, we prepare prayers for the in-person retreat.

IN-PERSON RETREAT

March 29 – April 1, 2025: The in-person retreat will involve guidance and teaching sessions with Dr. Akomolafe, Dancing with Mountains Artist-in-Residence Krista Dragomer, shared readings, sessions for mapping together, exercises in drawing together, the making of incomplete ‘mbaris’, and side-events with Ayin Press.

 

WHY ATTEND?

Selah is not a call for artists. It is not a call to make art for publication purposes. It is not a summoning of the extraordinary. It is a call hurled into the scorched ordinary, a call for others who might join us in tracing the irradiated material in the air.

• If you find yourself longing to think with your hands, with your animal senses,
• If you sense a growing exhaustion with dominant ways of responding to the travails of our times,
• If you believe sensuous solidarities are possible,
• If you are an activist, a beleaguered citizen of modern settlements, a parent, a social worker, a healer, an academic, or a person who feels these moments of trouble demand something ‘more’ from us,

Then this series is probably your invitation to exploration.

 

TEACHERS

 

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.

Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. To learn more about Dr. Akomolafe’s work, please visit www.bayoakomolafe.net and www.emergencenetwork.org.

 

Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working in visual art, text, and sound, often in collaboration with new media artists, musicians, writers, speakers and researchers in the fields of religion, philosophy, anthropology, biology and cultural studies. In symbiosis with her artwork is her teaching practice, Drawing on the Senses (DOTS). Krista is interested in the ways that sensory encounters with art can offer different approaches to public thought and has presented her art and workshops in academic conferences, art and science museums, concert venues, public parks, storefronts, DIY artist-run spaces, podcasts, and galleries. She is the 2024 Artist-in-Residence for Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s global postactivism project “We Will Dance With Mountains” and a collaborator with The Emergence Network. A short list of recent exhibitions and conferences include: the ICA Boston, Prix Ars Electronica where Krista received the 2021 Award of Distinction in Digital Musics & Sound for her work with Rashin Fahandej, Machines in Between: An Immersive Online Audio Program curated by Dr. John Modern, After Earth: Religion and Technology on a Changing Planet, put on by the International Society for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture. Krista has co-curated several of Dr. Eben Kirksey’s Multispecies Salon exhibitions and programs centering the intersection of art, research, and activism in local and global responses to the global climate crisis. A selection of her drawings is included in Dr. Beatrice Marovich’s “Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying” published by Columbia University Press, 2023 and she recently collaborated with For The Wild on their forthcoming anthology, expected spring 2025. https://www.kristadragomer.com/

 

 

Presented in Partnership with Ayin Press

 

 

 

COVID-19

The health and safety of our guests and staff is a top priority for the Garrison Institute. To attend a retreat or event all guests, teachers, and staff are required to self-test (at home antigen test is acceptable) within the 48-hour window prior to arriving for a retreat on site, and to bring a 2nd self-test kit when coming on site. We encourage everyone to self-monitor for symptoms of COVID-19 and other illnesses before your visit. If you experience symptoms or have a positive diagnosis, please notify us immediately at events@garrisoninstitute.org We will continue to follow any COVID-19 guidelines set forth by our local officials, New York State and the CDC.

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