For The Worldbuilders Ep. 030

Toni Morrison was in my dream yesterday...

Image Description: A color photo of me, an aspiring black rebel cyborg looking directly at the camera, wearing a re-constructed, archival Zaire Studio leather jacket I made in 2017 standing amongst the hardware of our time and the insistence of the forest. Photo: Chukwudumebi Ezefili

If the overlapping genocide in Gaza, Congo and Sudan could be possible inside the ontological framework of “human being” what frameworks might we need to imagine that makes these violent choreographies impossible?

“Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs” (2012) pg. 201 by João Costa and Joy A. James. Originally read on @the.black.gaze Instagram post from 4 days ago.

In this podcast:

• I open with what it’s like to be inside Week 5 of the Seed A World Retreat

• Then re-iterate who Seeda School is for. HINT: It’s for you and all the worldbuilders who are interested in nothing short of complete divestment from colonial imaginaries!

• I do a reading of Monday’s newsletter, “Refusing Colonial Categorization and Claiming Fractal Possibility”

• I evoke the work of Joy James, Frantz Fanon, and Akwaeke Emezi as it relates to the initial cognitive dissonance required to release any colonial promise of “certainty” and instead opt-in to a wild beyond that requires our collective imagination.

• Lastly, we wrap up with thinking about how the promise of “human” is feeling like it’s disintegrating right before our very eyes. What the fuck could a “humanitarian pause” even mean in the context of this violence? And what becomes possible when we release the framework that makes this violence possible?

Perhaps we step into something called “fractal possibility” or “fractal being”? Join me this Saturday to walk, talk, think, and hold each other through all the above.

I’ll be presenting Seeda School (in person) at Pioneer Works this weekend, for the 8th edition of Software for Artists Day (S4AD) on November 18th; celebrating the tenth anniversary of the School of Poetic Computation (SFPC).

In non-human solidarity,

Ayana