intro by Cliff Berrien
The first of my three presentations with Báyò Akómoláfé’s We Will Dance With Mountains. A Zoom meeting with between 800-1000 attendees. Báyò was absent during that particular session due to severe illness. The chat became a roiling tsunami of interpretations and opinions. Ever since this second live session on September 17th, conversation and inquiry have been alive on Vunja’s Mighty Networks. My intended prompt highlighted our epigenetic potential to reframe the extraordinarily problematic question (when directed at people) and fertile question (when in dialogue with “objects” in our everyday lives) “Where Are You From?…No…Where Are You REALLY From?” However, the outcome prompt reinforced the very systems of interlocking oppressions I had been questioning. By the end of my presentation, given technology and power dynamics, I unfortunately resigned myself to the normalizing dogma I had been attempting to uproot.
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