Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.
The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages.
Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating “as something other than displacement.” Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, “creating [bonds] through the rituals of reciprocal giving.” In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to “projects paved by the audacity to inhabit.” And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things, when one “chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed . . . over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly.”
These lectures are clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. Here, our 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.
LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist who is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. An independent scholar who uses Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the US. She is an award-winning musician and the author of eight previous books, including the nonfiction A Short History of the Blockade and the novels Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize, and This Accident of Being Lost, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her nonfiction collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, was a national bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
View titles by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.
The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages.
Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating “as something other than displacement.” Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, “creating [bonds] through the rituals of reciprocal giving.” In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to “projects paved by the audacity to inhabit.” And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things, when one “chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed . . . over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly.”
These lectures are clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. Here, our 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.
LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist who is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. An independent scholar who uses Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the US. She is an award-winning musician and the author of eight previous books, including the nonfiction A Short History of the Blockade and the novels Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize, and This Accident of Being Lost, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her nonfiction collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, was a national bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
View titles by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
