Bayo Akomolafe: Hope at the End of a World

• 27.8.2026 15:00 - 16:30
• Bayo Akomolafe
• Puistokatu 4

What if hope, especially hope framed as progress or healing, can also become a system that disciplines us?

We are happy to welcome Bayo Akomalafe to Puistokatu 4 to deliver a keynote lecture, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. This event is made possible as part of Dr. Akomolafe’s Visiting Professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki.

On Therapolis, Elpis, and the Foraging of Assemblice

Hope (Elpis) is often imagined as the engine of progress – the bright thread that pulls us through crisis. But what if hope is also a kind of gilded cage? In this lecture, I sit with hope’s capture: with the way Elpis powers Therapolis, the planetary-scale apparatus that promises healing, optimization, and futurity while quietly disciplining us into legibility. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology, new materialism, and the politics of the cracks, I offer ’assemblice’ as a foraged site of strange generativity – not a rejection of hope, but a sideways relation to it. To hope otherwise – paraterraneously – may be to refuse the demand that we know what to wish for, and to compost the futures we have been asked to hold.

The event is organized in collaboration with The Academy of Fine Arts and the Saastamoinen Foundation.

BIO:

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. He is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and currently the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025). Bayo is the host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, an educational consultation and the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene.

Sign up!