The Alchemy Lecture
The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four “Alchemists”—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures comprise The City of Our Dreaming, which shares their ideas for cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Together, V. Mitch McEwen, Laleh Khalili, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, offer new models for crafting architectures of freedom in disparate imaginative spaces. From suggesting a city modeled on buoyancy that reconsiders displacement and a dream of radical kinship and bonds through reciprocal giving, to “projects paved by the audacity to inhabit” that are built from dreams—the site from which all Black emancipation begins—and the ways collectives form at the thresholds between things, The City of our Dreaming is a clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. The Alchemists imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread, together.