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The
Realisation
Festival
8th — 11th
July 2021

A festival of unlearning and reimagining

The Realisation Festival is an annual agenda-setting event that seeks to advance societal transformation in a soulful way.   FIND OUT MORE

The festival takes place at St Giles House, the home of past politicians, philosophers and social reformers who have had a profound impact on the society in which we live. FIND OUT MORE

Our vision is to bring together a wide diversity of people with different views and perspectives to stimulate discussion, provide new insights and allow participants to learn and share ideas with others. Workshops will encourage participants to think, feel and explore what system change feels and looks like, and to reimagine what we are capable of.

We are holding a smaller gathering limited to 80 places, in our first year, to help shape and evolve the not-for-profit festival, with a view to growing in subsequent years and developing a programme of festival-related activities throughout the year. Tickets cost £295 and include all food, talks and activities during the festival and there is a range of accommodation options. Would you like to be part of it? BUY A TICKET

Speakers

Dominique Savitri

Artist and researcher

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Dominique Savitri

Artist and researcher

Dominique Savitri is an artist and researcher currently at Goldsmiths University. She develops embodied methods for undertaking her research. Committed to mapping out cosmologies of curiosity, her experiments often result in wonder. Building upon a sensuous material engagement at the heart of her artistic process, she develops and proposes modes of enchantment that operate as a practical philosophy for living, and are inspired by the spiritual traditions of non-duality.

Bayo Akomolafe

Public intellectual, Teacher, Essayist and Author

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Bayo Akomolafe

Public intellectual, Teacher, Essayist and Author

Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”
Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent.
In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality.
The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, 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. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’. www.bayoakomolafe.net

Mark Vernon

Writer and Psychotherapist

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Mark Vernon

Writer and Psychotherapist

Mark is a writer, psychotherapist and associate of Perspectiva. He contributes to and presents programmes on the radio, as well as writing for the national and religious press, and online publications. He also podcasts, in particular The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake, gives talks and leads workshops. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology, having studied at Durham, Oxford and Warwick universities. He is the author of several books, including his latest, A Secret History of Christianity, and forthcoming in September 2021, Dante’s Divine Comedy. He used to be an Anglican priest and lives in London, UK. Mark works on events with Perspectiva, as well as the notion of spiritual intelligence, which is not about problem-solving but the roots of awareness.
For more information see www.markvernon.com

Indra Adnan

Co-initiator, The Alternative UK

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Indra Adnan

Co-initiator, The Alternative UK

Indra is Co-initiator of The Alternative UK political platform, part of a global network originated by Alternativet, founded by Uffe Elbaek in Demnark. They publish a Daily Alternative media and run community collaboratories around the UK, building Citizen Action Networks (CANs) to reconnect people to the local eco-systems of solutions available. Central to the vision of an Alternative politics is the interdependency of the complex individual, the community and the planet: I, We, World.

Indra is concurrently a psycho-social therapist, founder and Director of the Soft Power Network, a writer and events producer. She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. She writes regularly for The Guardian and The Huffington Post and her publications Soft Power Agenda, New Times and Is the Party Over? are available on www.indraadnan.com

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What are the
big questions
of our times
asking of us?

Participants are asked to come with their disquiets, convictions and skills, to collaborate in an exploration of broad questions such as Who are “we”? What marks our times? How do we resource society, soul and politics for social transformation? How do we live with soul in a troubled society? How can a space like St Giles can help us think about 21st-century challenges such as climate emergency, racial division and gender inequality, social technologies and surveillance capitalism?

We will explore how to foster a holistic social conversation that evokes qualities of heart, mind and spirit that are non-ordinary, that take us beyond our habit energies and out of ourselves to look afresh at the crises we face.

VIEW THE PROGRAMME

A festival of unlearning and reimagining