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.

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 toward 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.