Krista Dragomer

It began with an email and a series of images that Krista sent to Báyò Akómoláfé, an international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled “trans-public” intellectual, and essayist, and founder of the The Emergence Network (TEN) and Dancing With Mountains (DWM). The response came:

I gasped when I encountered your art. I said to myself: "Here's another fascinating aesthetic exploration of the Afrocene!" Your work feels mycorrhizal, like it was painted with dirt...the way you uproot bodies and simultaneously re-root them in loamy soils simmering beneath the concrete floors of the Enlightenment.

Krista was then invited to join the assemblage of co-creators and contributors to the 2023 of iteration of We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! an online post-activist worldwide course-carnival, creating on-camera live drawings, sensorial documents of the WWWWM convenings.

In 2024, Krista was invited to be the inaugural/ongoing Vunja Artist in Residence for the entangled ecosystems of The Emergence Network and Dancing With Mountains.

What is “vunja”? Dancing With Mountains writes “you can think of “Vunja” as breakdance – the dance that breaks, and the breaks that instigate dances. In a profound sense, Vunja is what blackness seeks: breakages, openings in the coherence and purity of the master, cracks in the veneer of confidence, rifts in the vast territorial ‘body’ of the Man. We believe that these cracks are sites of excess where things spill over, where new forms of becoming-together might be cultivated. Vunja is a political and spiritual technology for gathering together, for assembling things in a queer way, for performing research.