Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World - The Alchemy Lecture 2023

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists - agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies - convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that ''for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.'' Informed by her practice of ''curation as care,'' Brazilian film curator Janaina Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: ''it''s almost by falling that you live... The beautiful world dances then stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.'' Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Bo