This year’s Guelph Lecture—On Being features a literary reading from novelist and humourist Drew Hayden Taylor, a dazzling music set from Juno-nominated Canadian songstress LU KALA, and a keynote conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Báyò Akómoláfé. The event will explore how we can collectively face the challenges of the disruptive and chaotic time we live in — from geopolitical instability to emergent forms of intelligence and technology.
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Meeting the End of the World as We Know It
A conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Báyò Akómoláfé
We are living through a profound moment of disruption and dissolution—economically, ecologically, relationally, and existentially. As familiar patterns and stories of modernity unravel, a fundamental question emerges: how might we encounter this shift not with immobilization or despair, but with curiosity, humility, relational depth, and a willingness to sense beyond inherited horizons.
Báyò Akómoláfé and Vanessa Andreotti invite us to gently meet this unraveling world not as an abstract event happening “out there,” but as an embodied, collective practice of facing complexity, uncertainty, and complicity right where we stand.
This lecture offers neither easy answers nor clear solutions, but a nuanced exploration of how we might hospitably meet endings as openings to other ways of sensing, relating, and responding. Woven through this exploration is an acknowledgement of emergent forms of intelligence—technologies deeply entangled in both modernity’s harm and its possibilities—inviting us to engage rather than reject, and to recognize our entanglement within webs of complicity and co-responsibility.
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The River Run Centre is a physically accessible venue. This event will feature live transcription and ASL interpretation. For details on the festival’s accessibility, please visit our general accessibility page.
We encourage guests to stay home if they feel unwell. Please reduce the use of scented products (e.g. perfume, cologne) for this event.
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Sliding Scale tickets are available to anyone via riverrun.ca. We invite you to select the price option that works best for you.
Also check out other Arts events in Guelph, Literary Art events in Guelph, Festivals in Guelph.
