Krista is the inaugural/ongoing Vunja Artist in Residence, collaborating directly with Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, Dancing With Mountains, and The Emergence Network to create sensory worlds on and offline, participatory experiences, artworks, and workshops that invite entangled kinships of these formations to explore the embodied aesthetic and practice of post-activism.
You can think of “Vunja” as breakdance – the dance that breaks, and the breaks that instigate dances. In a profound sense, Vunja is what blackness seeks: breakages, openings in the coherence and purity of the master, cracks in the veneer of confidence, rifts in the vast territorial ‘body’ of the Man. We believe that these cracks are sites of excess where things spill over, where new forms of becoming-together might be cultivated. Vunja is a political and spiritual technology for gathering together, for assembling things in a queer way, for performing research.
Vunja is closest to the heart of what We Will Dance with Mountains wants to do with politics: we want to see a groundswell and flashing-up of manifold creativities.—Dancing With Mountains
Dancing with Mountains will host Krista’s online course Monstering: How to Draw Your Head (forthcoming April 2025), which will invite participants into “monstering” practices that queer what is taken as the familiar or the known, offering practices to sense sideways, to draw bodies into new and stranger formations, postures, and possible ethical sensibilities.
If we took seriously the assertions that modern civilization wobbles precariously at the edges of a climate disaster, which is in turn comorbid with intensified racial discrimination and the escalation of a politics of the personal, one might suppose that the thing to do then is to look straightforwardly at our problems and attempt solutions. However, what if “looking-straight” is connected to a visual and postural performance that is in part complicit in the perpetuation of these manifold crises we are experiencing? —Báyò Akómoláfé
In her role as the Artist in Residence for the 2023 iteration of We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! Krista created on-camera live drawings, sensorial documents of the WWWWM convenings.
All titles correspond to the live session titles:
1st row : Sensorium I, Sensorium III
2nd row: Dancing in the Afrocene, The Minor Gesture
3rd row: Hears in Red, Sees in Wet, Getting Lost in the Forest
4th row: Sawubona