The Guelph Lecture—On Being 2025

On May 2nd attendees at this year’s Guelph Lecture—On Being were treated to a literary reading from novelist and humourist Drew Hayden Taylor (see full video below), a dazzling music set from Juno-nominated Canadian songstress LU KALA, and a keynote conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Báyò Akómoláfé (see below). The event explored 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.

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.

The River Run Centre is a physically accessible venue. This event  featured live transcription and ASL interpretation. For details on the festival’s accessibility, please visit our general accessibility page.

Sliding Scale tickets were available for this event.