Krista is the inaugural Artist in Residence for Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé’s global para-pedagogical project Dancing with Mountains (2024).
In this role, Krista’s art and Drawing on the Senses practice converge with Dr. Akomolafe’s articulations of postactivism. Together, Krista and Bayo explore the possibilities of co-sensing at the edges of the human, via public talks, participatory practices, online courses, and experimental text and art collaborations. Dancing with Mountains will host Krista’s online course on monsters (forthcoming November 2024), which will invite participants into “monstering” practices that queer what is taken as the familiar or the known, offering practices to draw bodies into new and stranger formations, postures, and possible ethical sensibilities. This work is animated by Krista and Bayo’s interest in the pararepresentational and the paraterranean, which they have put forward as a disruption of the visual hegemony that modernism instrumentalizes to territorialize bodies.
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
Her work in this role also involves collaborating with the Dancing with Mountains team in their explorations into engaging the public around the inquiry of creating carnivals as a para-pedagocical assembly.
Learn more and join Krista + Bayo in Vunja! Dreaming Together Communal Sensing Series, a monthly online gathering, by writing to: courseteams@dancingwithmountains.com
In her role as the Artist in Residence for the 2023 iteration of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s post-activist course-festival, 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