02/06/2026
To paraphrase - We come out of, not too, the world - a thought and feeling provoking perspective shift.
perspective we might say is everything….
The Yorubas have a proverb about how children are given to their mothers and to the hands that welcome them. It is said that children do not come into the world, they come out of it.
The distinction is critical: to come into the world is to presume a metaphysics of clean entries and pure arrivals. To come into the world is to fall from the sky. It is to have been positioned outside the world before the journey.
But to come out of the world is to have always been part of the world. It is to stretch the world's limits, to drag its grime and dust and murk and quivering bacteria and murmuring creases and shimmering shadows and tattooed landscapes and pustular surfaces and ancestral sedimentations and colonial arrangements and theogonic accommodations and industrial fevers and speculative geologies and racial productions and civilisational traumas and ethical longings into the irreverent bump of an engorged belly.
To come out of the world is to notice that the "new" is a radical composition: bodies do not sprout from pure places. Bodies are composed with colonial threads, with violent textures, with imperial sedimentations, with accommodations that already inhere with the violences that produced them. There is no precolonial body to return to, no innocence to regain - for innocence itself is not the absence of tension but the arrangement of sensibility in such a way as to contain those tensions and their exilic powers. Innocence is accommodated tension.
In this sense, the new is grotesque. The grotesque is how I see bodies within radical composition. The word itself carries more weight and prestige than its modern flattening might allow us to see. It comes from grotta, the grotto, the cave, the underground chamber. The grotesque was first used to describe the strange paintings discovered in the underground ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome - fantastical figures, hybrid forms, bodies that mixed human and animal and plant in ways that violated every classical taxonomy.
The grotesque is the aesthetic of the paraterranean (my speculative geological term for the churning within the settled). This is the strange, speculative life of the body produced by the sorting mechanisms that distribute the body into categories. The grotesque is the worldly, the unfinished, the limitation of the taxonomic, a refusal of purity, and an invitation to apprentice the new as a wondering, wandering, coddiwompling, awkward falling-apart-together in the moral strongholds that lock us into the safety of the normative.
Báyò Akomolafe
Image: A clay model of my hand, composed with the most carnivalesque materials - kaolin and basalt and more - by my sister, colleague, artist, and self-avowed "materials nerd", Krista Dragomer.
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