Meet at the Crossroads Project Description

Where do we go when the world burns, when we are politically homeless, when we need new ways of making sense of things?

We meet at the crossroads.

Meet at the Crossroads was launched as a gifting circle and mycelial network of research inquiry into the postactivist implications of responsibility in our turbulent world; it was a fugitive series of monthly online gatherings hosted by Aerin Dunford and Báyò Akómoláfé and produced by Yeyo Beltrán in 2020 and 2021. For six months we met with fellow travelers in an ephemeral yet tangible way to explore expressions of postactivism in different localities around the world. These gatherings in the cracks took on power, agency and responsivity; they were an invitation to take seriously the posthumanist implications of living creatively in a colonial order, and an attempt to build wilder coalitions of sharing and inquiry. Meet at the Crossroads was an intimate, yet intangible series of dialogues to host postactivist practices of the beyond. 

This humble attempt to weave a stronger network of friendship and support for The Emergence Network was inspired by the enduring figure of the fugitive, especially the wide-eyed-with-heart-beating-in-mouth “New World” slave, who had to conduct research inquiries with moss-covered trees, with the direction of winds, and with covert methods of stealing away, in order to extricate himself or herself from the incarceration of the slave plantation.

Those creative approaches to oppression present themselves to us today as an archetype worthy of attention – and as an instigation to postactivism.

Every month we were greeted by a new Meet at the Crossroads “guest-host” who invited us into their homes and onto their farms, to cook with them in their kitchens and move in their dance studios. We gathered for 90 minutes using an ever-elusive Zoom link to venture inside the day-to-day lives of our guests. The series was focused on how these invitees are responding to questions and generating new ones during these times. We also gathered in smaller groups, cooking up more questions and working with this materiality as an entry point to co-create and share recipes and rituals as part of our research. As fugitives, we were in constant movement, covering our footprints as we went; the sessions were never recorded: they disappeared forever. The only trace of their happening lies in the questions and recipes generated from each encounter.

The principal curators for Meet at the Crossroads were Sergio (Yeyo) Beltrán, Aerin Dunford and Báyò Akómoláfé.