Hosted by Dr. Bayo Akomolafe & Laura Peña Zanatta
Online Course: March 4, March 10, March 21
In-Person Retreat: March 27- March 31
In this gathering of the School of the Cracks, we will explore the idea that societal systems and certainties have inherent fissures (cracks) that serve as potent sites for unexpected transformation and new ways of being. Join Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and Laura Peña Zanatta for this online and in-person exploration of this concept. The online course culminates in the in-person retreat.
With rising fires and blood-orange skies inflamed by loss, genocide, and the drift of authoritarian winds, the weather forecast for the futures we hope for doesn’t look too good. In the middle of multidimensional storms, a singular question – emerging from the anxieties of our days – pierces the spin of things: what do we do? How do we become responsible to these moments of ruin and rule? How do we show up at the end of the world?
Scholar Laura Peña Zanatta and Professor Bayo Akomolafe straddle the liminally bioluminescent beaches between the settled shores and the promiscuous oceanic, offering not an answer but a ritual, an invitation, and a troubling provocation: what if all we can do is an exhausted reinforcement of the trouble? What if the way we respond to the problem is part of the problem?
At this retreat, the School will convene itself once more to explore the cracks, which are generative sites that mark where systems, identities, and worldviews (accommodations) fracture. The crack is not deficiency; rather, it is a multiplicative hyperpresence and excess that cannot be contained by stable form. It is the sacred breach – an invitation to bleed out of systems that hold us too tightly. The crack is where reality gets rewritten.
Along with the times, we ask, “how do we show up now?” The School aims to investigate the ethical tremble before it crystallizes into usefulness, to sit with the unthought in ritual, and to open up space for sensorial apostasy.
We come together not to fix the world, but to notice its unraveling with care. To gather in assemblages of difference, to steep in the residues of what no longer works, and to midwife the unspeakable shapes emerging through collapse. This is not a space for answers; this is a space for apprenticing the disfigurement that marks our bodies and traces out new worlds, seditiously. This is an attunement to grief, to wonder, to refusal, to silence, and to the trembling edges of being undone.
In this gathering of the School of the Cracks, we will slow down, resist the seductions of immediacy, and wander into the thresholds that blur categories. We will walk with uncertainty, explore rituals of shared disorientation, and experiment with gestures of solidarity that do not rush to legibility. Through embodied exercises, dialogue, dreaming, movement, and ceremonial pause, we will practice the impossible art of staying with the crack – to listen to what worlds it might already be whispering into existence.
This is not a workshop. This is not leadership training. This is not a retreat from the world.
This is an arrival into the slippery sacred, the fugitive terrain where language breaks, where bodies remember, and where the end of the world might just be the beginning of something feral and free.
Come. To become disoriented together.
ABOUT
The School of the Cracks is co-stewarded by Báyò Akómolafé’s Dancing With Mountains and Laura Peña Zanatta’s MetaMorf. It is their most comprehensive organizational articulation of a posthumanist, decolonial philosophy. The “School” is defined fundamentally by what it refuses and the fugitive cosmopoetics it seeks to cultivate in the face of civilizational impasse. It is not an institution in the conventional, pedagogical sense, offering no degrees, no certification, and no curriculum designed to produce competency. Instead, it is conceptualized as a para-institutional architecture, a ceremonial field, an evolving ritual, and a sanctuary for unlearning.
Photo: Stubborn Sculptor by Adeniyi Adewole (b. 1994). Adewole is a Nigerian contemporary sculptor whose figurative works explore the emotional and psychological weight of the human experience. Working primarily with clay and fiberglass, he transforms everyday encounters into metaphors for healing, release, and resilience. His sculptures reflect on mental health, vulnerability, and the quiet strength found in letting go, drawing inspiration from Yoruba philosophies of balance, endurance, and renewal.
SESSIONS
***You will be emailed a link to the course materials on Kajabi a week before the course begins ***
March 4, 2026 (11:30 a.m. ET to 1:00 p.m. ET)
March 10, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET to 1:00 p.m. ET)
March 21, 2025 (11:30 a.m. ET to 2:00 p.m.)
March 27 – March 31
SCHOLARSHIPS
There are a limited number of partial scholarships available for this retreat. Please visit us here for more information, and click here to apply . Please do not sign up for the retreat if you have submitted an application, wait to hear from us. For questions, please contact us at: scholarships@garrisoninstitute.org.
TEACHERS
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).
In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).
He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.
Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. To learn more about Dr. Akomolafe’s work, please visit www.bayoakomolafe.net and www.emergencenetwork.org.
Laura Peña Zanatta is an organizational consultant, facilitator, experience designer, artist, and theorist-enthusiast exploring the conceptualization of rituals and their significance in contemporary times.
She has worked extensively as a consultant, helping companies gain awareness of their organizational culture, uncover underlying structures, and foster transformation from within. Some of her clients include Google, Nubank, KPMG, and Embraer.
The metacrisis was a major catalyst for her expanding her work to investigate how rituals can serve as bridges between systemic crises and regenerative futures.
She sees ritual, art, and performance as powerful mediums for constructing new affective landscapes and expanding relational possibilities. Her work is also deeply informed by her background in dance — over ten years of experience — and her studies in performance art with La Fura dels Baus in 2023.
Currently, she is an innovation professor at Fundação Dom Cabral. Alongside her corporate consultancy projects, she is also working with the J Randle Museum in Nigeria, a project dedicated to co-creating contemporary breathing spaces and pathways inspired by the richness and vitality of Yoruba culture. For more about Laura’s work, please visit metamorf.me.
ACCOMMODATIONS