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The Alchemy Lecture

Four Alchemists. One Lecture. A Constellation of Ideas.

Each year, the Alchemy Lecture brings together a constellation of thinkers and practitioners from diverse disciplines and geographies to engage publicly with the most pressing questions of our time. 

A multi-vocal and multi-modal forum, the Alchemy Lecture creates space for collective reflection on the social, political and environmental challenges shaping our world. Each lecture culminates in the publication of a book in Alchemy by Knopf, the series headed by Dionne Brand, extending the ideas and conversations that emerge from the event.

Previous Alchemy Lecture publications, including last year's Sound—at the Interregnum, are available for purchase in the lobby after the event and at the York University Bookstore. The book resulting from this year's lecture will be published in September 2027 and will be available for purchase at next year's event.

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ScALE

2026 Alchemy lecture graphic

Date: Thursday, Oct. 29
Time: 5 - 8 p.m.; Reception: 5 - 6 p.m.
Venue: Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Theatre, CIBC Lobby

Join Professor Christina Sharpe, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies and an internationally recognized group of scholars, artists and researchers for ScALE, the Fifth Annual Alchemy Lecture. 

Featuring presentations from:

  • Torkwase Dyson on the diagram, the gesture and the field of Black liberation. 
  • Thandi Loewenson on land, air, indigenous cosmologies and the interconnected terrains through which struggles for sovereignty must be understood.
  • Lorenzo Pezzani on human and more-than-human im-mobilities and the project of liberation.
  • Audra Simpson on Indigeneity and measuring the scale of harm in Canada and the United States.

Explore the abstracts below for a deeper look at the themes each speaker will examine and the conversations that will shape this year's Alchemy Lecture.

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Moderator: Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023)—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. In 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities. In 2025 she was named a Killam Prize winner. In 2026, Sharpe was named a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2027) and To Have Been to the End of the World: Essays on Art. Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine and The Funambulist.

christina sharpe profile photo

Speaker Abstracts

Torkwase Dyson

Thandi Loewenson

Lorenzo Pezzani

Audra Simpson

Torkwase Dyson profile photo

Photo credit ©️ Hansi Liao

Torkwase Dyson

(US) Interdisciplinary Artist

Torkwase Dyson combines expressive mark-making and geometric abstractions to explore continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and sound, Dyson interrogates the built environment, exploring how individuals negotiate, negate, and transfer systems of spatial order. Dyson studied sociology and social work at Tougaloo College, Mississippi (1996), and received a BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University (1999) and an MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art (2003). In 2026, Dyson will debut a commissioned work as a featured artist for the 59th Carnegie International, as well a new installation for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. She will also have her first solo exhibition in Austria at Kunsthaus Bregenz.

In this presentation, I will discuss forming paintings that invite experiences of illusion, perspective, and presence to comprehend multiscalar planetary state-change in elevation. My project is a discursive spacetime question of distance and perceptual motion, scaled to express ongoing extraordinary concentration (the sacred) and environmental liberation.

Between the diagram and the gesture, I explore how to compose visual structures between the might of black trajectory and rhizomes of black mind/speed/time that develop infrastructures for collective improvisation and radical indeterminacy. I will address painting as a language of simultaneity that scales physics to service this mind-space bond as a spectrum. I will conclude by centering gravity, evaporation, mediation, distance, and force multipliers in the expanded field of liberation.

Thandi Loewenson profile photo

Thandi Loewenson

(UK/Zimbabwe) Architectural Designer and Researcher

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds.  Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations.

In Zimbabwe in the 90s, a long-running television jingle proclaimed ‘Our future is our land’. It still plays in quieter moments in my mind. Those of us ‘born free’, mwana wevhu, ‘sons and daughters of the soil’, were told that here, in the ‘breadbasket of Africa’, our liberation was won through a struggle for the land and would continue through the sovereignty and self-determination that land would deliver.

Land figures heavily in the spatial dynamics of oppression on the continent and also in the political imaginaries of worlds otherwise; through contesting regimes of private property; systems of dispossession, grabbing and redistribution; and exploitative conditions of farming and mining. Decades later, our future is still our land, the terrain of freedom dreams and demands.

This performance lecture unfolds through a series of found and original drawings, including: the notation of a particle of graphite; animals and shooting stars inscribed onto rock 20,000 years ago; mineral prospecting maps and cadastral plans; depictions of alien visitations on colonial farms; visions of guerrillas who turned into birds to evade capture; and attempts to map the entire universe. Entering into the worlds of these drawings, I put forward that the focus on land forecloses more nuanced readings of the interconnected terrains through which struggles for sovereignty must be understood: taking place in ‘earth’, within the thickness of eroding topsoil, down the mineshaft where rare earths glimmer in the dark and, simultaneously, in the ‘air’—in the heat, within the density of suspended toxic particles, through digital dispossession in 'the cloud' and in the ionosphere, where Earth's eroding atmosphere meets Outer Space too.

Through research into political and technological movements in Zimbabwe and its surrounds, I examine how an epistemology of land comes into being through colonial imaginaries, legal and state instruments and, conversely, through liberation rhetoric and representation. I look at how indigenous cosmologies, liberation and labour movements and space technologists (and sometimes those operating across these fields) redraw constructed dichotomies between earth and air.

Rather than understand earth and air as distinct, this work argues that these are mutually constructed terrains through which racialisation, dispossession and exploitation are forged on the continent, and through which they must be contested.

Lorenzo Pezzani profile photo

Lorenzo Pezzani

(Italy) Architect and Researcher

Lorenzo Pezzani is an architect and researcher. His work explores the spatial politics, visual cultures and political ecologies of migration and borders. Over more than a decade, as co-founder of projects such as Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics, he has worked at the crossroad of academic research, the arts and non-governmental activism, bringing new interdisciplinary perspectives on pressing issues such as migration, border violence and the environmental crisis. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, where he directs LIMINAL, a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities through forensic imagination, and leads the "Hostile Environments" ERC project. His work has been used as evidence in courts of law, published across different media, and exhibited internationally.

Accounting for the violence of borders (a shorthand for the many political technologies designed to produce and maintain global racial capitalism) means paying attention simultaneously to atmospheres of surveillance infiltrating the most minute aspects of everyday life and to geohistorical processes of extraction that span generations and planetary geographies. In this sense, it prompts us to think about scale as an epistemic frame (that, as any act of framing, reveals as much as it conceals), and calls for a practice of travelling across scales. Doing that, however, is not the seamless transition that digital technologies so often create the illusion of providing. Grounded in a long-standing collaborative spatial practice aiming at documenting and challenging the violence that the European border regime systematically produces, this presentation ask what threads and traces can be followed to move across divergent and incommensurate scales of (border) violence? At a time of rampant onslaught on people and ecologies, what does thinking about human and more-than-human im-mobilities in their wider spatial and temporal reverberations produce? And how can that become part of a wider project of liberation?

Audra Simpson

Audra Simpson

(Kahnawà:ke Mohawk/Canada/US) Anthropologist

Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics and history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) and has articles and book chapters spanning various fields. She was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in 2018, the Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Unit for Criticism and Theory at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 2019 and Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeniety at the University of Chicago in Spring, 2023. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2020 she won the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching. She was the second anthropologist in the history of the award to do so. She is a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk.

“Scale” is often associated with measurement and invites the question of relationship: how to describe “size” to “degree” of “effects.” From the minute to the massive, to impactful, how do we measure or account for how “scale” codes impacts? How do we correlate “scale” with how we perceive what matters?  How do we use scale when discussing or analyzing “historical harm”? This lecture will examine how the legal-like concept of harm is used to argue significance in a context where the very problem appears imperceptible. Native people have been beset by what is to them a huge harm and violation, the phenomenon of fake Indians, people who claim to be them, and are not. This violates their community reckoning systems, their group rights as “tribal” or “first nations” peoples with sovereignty, and it undermines their histories as collectives of families with shared experiences. How to scale this in ways that make others understand “this really matters” when the subject in question has been scaled to zero? In many ways this sociological and political problem is a manifestation of the larger issue that is indigeneity in the U.S. and in Canada, being scaled to nothing in spite of being something.

Our Partners

Alchemy Logo by Knopf Canada
The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at University of Toronto logo
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Past Events

October 30, 2025

Each lecture culminates in the publication of a book bearing the title of that year's convening in the imprint, headed by Dionne Brand, Alchemy by Knopf. Along with the inclusion of an introduction, each book extends the public lecture and builds on its alchemical form. These lectures (and the book that will result from them) speak into the interregnum of precipitous climate catastrophe and social and political reckoning.

Hosted by Christina Sharpe – Professor, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, Ravi de Costa – Associate Dean of LA&PS, Janice Anderson – Assistant Professor, Trent University, Research Associate, Alchemy Lecture, Sheba Wiafe – PhD Student, SPTH, York University and Ola Mohammed – Assistant Professor, Humanities, York University.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, available September 2026.

October 30, 2024

All of us who are drawn to cities imagine them as much as find them. We imagine places for collective living, art and community making. What we find is that we are pushed out by capital, condofication, and financialization. What are the cities of our dreaming? Who lives there and how do we live there? The city of our dreaming is one of our collective inhabitation.

The four speakers for The City of Our Dreaming imagined 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.

Hosted by Christina Sharpe – Professor, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, Andrea Davis – Associate Vice President EDI, Wilfrid Laurier, Jan Anderson – Assistant Professor of English, Trent University and Ravi de Costa – Associate Dean of LA&PS.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, available September 23, 2025.

November 2, 2023

The Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and York University were proud to be hosting the Second Annual Alchemy Lecture.

The lecture was delivered by five renowned alchemists: Joseph M. Pierce, Phoebe Boswell, Cristina Rivera Garza, Saidiya Hartman and Janaína Oliveira.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, published in September 2024.

November 10, 2022

The lecture was delivered by four renowned alchemists: Dele Adeyemo (UK) architect, creative director, and urban theorist; Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) poet, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University; Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) Associate Professor in philosophy, Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University; and Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) Writer, and Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, published in October 2023.