The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path towards this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator Janaína Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

Phoebe Boswell is an artist whose work is held in collections including the British Museum, LACMA, and RISD.

Saidiya Hartman is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Janaína Oliveira is a film curator and professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro.

Joseph M. Peirce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Cristina Rivera Garza is M.D. Anderson Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston.

Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.

“What must be made manifest, confronted, spoken in these catastrophic times includes the rejection of that which is manufactured as consent. . . . These Alchemy Lectures make clear that a lecture is not a spectacle: it is a gathering; it is a communion; we meet, here, to make plans, to see a way—many ways—to go on.”
-- Christina Sharpe, from the Introduction