Midas, the Naïve Environmentalist
“Already, at breakfast, [he] was excessively hungry. Would he be less so by dinner-time? And how ravenous would be his appetite for supper, which must undoubtedly consist of the same sort of indigestible dishes as those now before him! How many days, think you, would he survive a continuance of this rich fare?”
Nathaniel Hawthorne The Golden Touch
“where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.”
Thomas Gray Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
INTRO
Here is a story of a foolish man who was not paying attention and died. A man who could not eat his food because everything he touched turned to gold, so he starved to death… but wait! He did not die; he washed away the golden touch by bathing in a river so he could eat again. His name is Midas, and when he realized he might starve to death, he begged the gods for forgiveness… wait! He had a daughter he turned into a golden statue by kissing her. That is when he asked for forgiveness… right. What other stories have been told, and whatever happened to Midas? [1].
One thing to know is that perhaps Midas could be the first, but certainly is not the only one who attempted to create wealth out of thin air. Alchemists also wanted to transmute lead into gold, allegedly to create an elixir of immortality. They paid much attention to and developed a hermetic material understanding of reality and a physics-philosophical system and processes. Could an alchemist also be a king, like Midas, who desired to remain unnoticed at one point or another?
WISE-FOOL THINKING
What kind of unwise wish is it to turn everything into gold? Even Dionysus, the god who granted the wish, initially found the idea troublesome [2]. Although the ability to fabricate gold out of other materials might appeal to the ambitions of Homo economicus, it poses a danger to how he assigns value[3]. But what about the ability to turn gold into other materials? Is it wise to turn gold into food? Or would it be foolish to turn gold into something of no apparent value, like excrement?
Reverse Alchemy, a cross-disciplinary artwork by U.S.-born N.Y.-based artist Jessica Segall, poses these questions about gold transcendence on multiple occasions and forms. Through the seemingly absurd exploration of gold transformation into matter that does not have a stellar shine, Jessica performs an art loaded with living matter and involves scientific methods with possible but not yet plausible applications. She practices an artistic science magicians would like to master: the disappearance of gold as a single element and its reappearance as a holistic entity. If we pay attention to the procedures employed in such transformations, an array of long-time eschewed ways of assigning value comes to the fore.
Since its first inception in 2019 to a more recent installment in 2021, in Reverse Alchemy, gold has been eaten, excreted, used as fertilizer, dissolved, irrigated, and recast with sand and basalt. Jessica's primary goal with this durational project is to reintroduce gold into the environment as a symbolic gesture accompanying environmentalist advocacy to "keep gold in the ground" [4]. Furthermore, this is also a gesture that questions a fundamental operation of economic systems: accumulation. This is capitalism's golden touch, the transformation of life into economic power accumulated by a few.
Right after copper, gold has accompanied human history and enabled various manifestations of power. The malleability and durability of these metals captured the interest of human affairs and needs. Still, gold's aesthetic properties made it the undisputed bearer of ordinary perceptions of purity and perfection[5]. Gold's contemporary uses beyond economic power –computation, telecommunications, and health technology, to name a few– perpetuate its stature and our dependence on it[6]. Gold traverses our bodies and captures our imaginations. We can not get rid of it even if we try, or can we?
Maybe one of Jessica's most illustrative insights about gold is the thinking of it as a hyperobject[7] that transmutes power structures while remaining the same. In her words, gold has "been changing hands from empire to empire for the last 400 years" [8]. Indeed, gold's composition does not change; what changes is the method of acquisition and purification. More complex and destructive procedures must be used as reserves get exhausted[9].
Thinking of gold as an expanded category proves helpful as a tool for analysis and discourse. Whether looking to critique established notions or looking at creative, new applications of the word: we can have black gold as some like to call oil, black-gold agriculture, and its formalization as an industrialized product[10], or Golden rice as a highly controversial GMO superfood[11]. Gold is everywhere, even in surnames like Goldsmith, Goldstein, or Goldberg. So it is not just thinking of it as an expanded concept; it is finding it concentrated and equally dispersed everywhere, even in human feces[12].
But how does gold find its way to everything? What is the secret functioning of this golden touch? King Midas is a Homo economicus poster boy, turning life into a static and never changing shine. How is it that capitalism gets such a tight hold on life? An essential reference to Jessica on this matter is Silvia Federici. A social sciences scholar and leading feminist theoretician best known for her recount of the origins of capitalism as a "counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle" [13]. Federici, along with various feminist organizations throughout the world, identifies debt–specifically microcredits–as the means to accumulate capital and exert social control: a "financial colonization of social reproduction" [14].
Debt is one part of the equation, how life gets sucked in. But how is it maintained in the system, turned into a gold statue? Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre elaborate on the subject and propose a characterization of capitalism as a system specialized in creating "infernal alternatives" out of "moving reorganizing fluxes" [15]. If you find yourself stuck and try to move to get loose, the system reorganizes itself–through the invisible hand–so you can't get away. Thanks to climate change, capitalism can kill you, like quicksand, given the right time and conditions! In Isabelle's words, "What we know now is that if we grit our teeth and continue to have confidence in economic growth, we are going, as one says, straight to the wall." [16]
Capitalism's hold on life includes all life, as climate change forces us to recognize. But it holds in a way that obscures understanding, with a paradoxical ordering of everything down to the last detail. A rational, scientifically based hierarchy that draws time arrows and puts humanity ahead in an evolutionary race. Climate change is forcing us to see that there is no hierarchy, no evolutionary race to be won. All life and non-life are together in a mesh of everything relatedness[17].
Reverse Alchemy has involved human and non-human collaboration in all of its episodes. Jessica has worked inside and outside established art spaces with horses and plants as active collaborators–perhaps it is safe to call them performers–along with scientists and social justice workers. Of particular note are Máxima Acuña and her horse Lucero, who took part in the project when Jessica visited Perú, where they live. Máxima is a farmer fighting to keep her land out of the hands of the extractivist minions of capitalism who are tasting the gold underneath[18]. Jessica applied edible gold leaf to various vegetables Máxima grew, who later fed them to Lucero with no less amusement.
Afterward, Jessica worked with a horse named Lion at the La Borie gallery in the commune of Solignac (Haute-Vienne, France.) She fed Lion with straw coated in edible gold leaf and collected its manure from the gallery floor, and she later used it to fertilize the surrounding gardens. Jessica's interest in working with horses goes beyond their ability to produce fecal matter and their symbolism in the hermetic language of medieval alchemists[19]. Working with animals is part of Jessica's historical, artistic practice, not just Reverse Alchemy. One could say that she is practicing interspecies sociality in the Chthulucene[20].
A horse in a gallery inevitably brings to mind Jannis Kounellis' Untitled (12 Horses), staged at L'Attico Gallery (Rome, Italy) in 1969. One of the iconic works of Arte Povera. A work that sought to counter an increasingly consumerist society by creating unsellable art. The presence of living components in an artwork was a staple of Arte Povera. Germano Celant stated that this is an art not interested "in using elementary materials and processes to describe or represent nature" but an art that finds a link between man, minerals, animals, and plants as "systems [that] work in much the same way, tied as they are, to common processes of change" [21].
There is a coincidence between Celant words propelling Arte Povera and the simple but very effective wordplay "natureculture" advanced by Donna Haraway. As she wrote in 2003, "Historical specificity and contingent mutability rule all the way down, into nature and culture, into naturecultures." [22] Haraway and Celant point to the complex entanglement of entities next to each other throughout time, and culture has never been apart or outside nature.
Time is essential in Jessica's long-breath processes, from patiently gold-leafing hay, dissolving gold with acids, irrigating golden solutions, and waiting for animals and plants to digest and absorb. Working with living matter means working with noticeably transformative matter. With Reverse Alchemy, Jessica highlights the attention and care that must be paid to feeding and maintaining bodily entities. A share of energy passes through the entanglement.
Feeding and maintaining as processes of a work of art brings to mind another Arte Povera iconic work: Untitled (Structure that Eats) by Giovanni Anselmo. A work first staged in 1968 comprising a lettuce pinned between two blocks of granite, one taller than the other, tied initially together and aligned at the top with a thin vine. When the lettuce dehydrates, the tie loosens, and the shorter piece of granite falls to the floor. To maintain the integrity of the artwork, fresh lettuce has to be "fed" to the sculpture. As in other Anselmo works, gravity is employed as a signaler of potential energy.
Gold is also known as the sun metal, the circular perfection: symbolizing energy. Perhaps the alchemists appreciated this in gold, the potentiality of life frozen in it. The elixir that would transmute base metals into gold would also cure all diseases and thus bring immortality. They called it the philosopher's stone. For argumentation's sake, it is perhaps fair to wonder if the philosopher's stone and the stone of madness–satirically painted by Hieronymus Bosch–are the same [23].
BACK INSIDE
"We are going to change the discourse to say that it is the government and international capital that must return to us all the social wealth that they have accumulated, that they have stolen from our lives."
Silvia Federici[24]
Various authors have written about King Midas, adding situations and characters to the original narrative circulating in oral form during the Classical Greek period[25]. Marigold, King Midas's daughter, was added by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1851. He describes Marigold as a joyous golden-haired girl that likes to smell the garden roses and loves her father. Midas tragically turns Marigold into a statue with a kiss intended to console her. She was upset because her father turned the roses into a cold metallic and pale thing[26].
Another frozen, life-demanding female figure present in U.S. lore is Lady Liberty. We refer to the engraved version of the Gold Eagle coin-turned-pendant that Jessica dissolves with aqua regia[27]. The U.S. Mint gold coin pendant brings forth images of national identity: on one side Lady Liberty and, on the other, a bald eagle[28]. Its dissolution addresses contemporary concerns about important issues such as the nation's and Earth's state. In Jessica's words, she is "dissolving an empire" as a step in a reverse engineering process that goes further.
The partner in crime for the vanishing act of gold–and its political and economic power–is York R. Smith. A metallurgical engineer whose research interests include extractive/chemical metallurgy, electrochemistry, energy conversion, and storage materials[29]. Jessica and York worked together to conceive an art-inspired science that would allow gold to be transformed as required. York recalls on the University of Utah's blog, "Over time, the solution [aqua regia] gets progressively darker as the gold dissolves into the liquid mixture, much like salt dissolves into boiling water." One purpose was to film the coin pendant to accompany Reverse Alchemy in various of its episodes. As it happened, the video was shown at ICPNA (Peru), at ZAZ Corner–10 Times Square (New York)–under the name Reverse Alchemy in Conga (Aqua Regia). The video shown as a part of Reverse Alchemy on the Gold Coast at Locust Projects (Miami) in 2021 is a later version filmed in NYC.[30]
Art and science collaborate more often than we realize. One example is a team of artists, designers, and architects led by the late philosopher Bruno Latour, working with various scientists on Critical Zones. But not just any example because this interdisciplinary collaboration has involved innovative conceptual visualization tools that required the reversal of long-established modes and points of view. One such tool is the Gaia-graphy developed by French landscape architect Alexandra Arènes, a mapping of the thin layer of Earth where life interacts with the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. This is the complex layer known as the Critical Zone that scientists struggle to visualize. [31]
A Gaia-graphy shows the Earth as a circular, flat schematic slice where we can see the critical zone from the inside out. This means that where we would typically place the Earth's core, we now find space, and where we would expect space, the core extends. This allows for unpacking the Earth's interior and more precise mapping of the various processes that scientists track interrelatedly. It is especially useful for tracking the length of geological processes with simple spirals and straight lines. [32] This visualization tool gets its name from James Lovelock and Lyn Margullis, who call the Earth Gaia, like the Greek goddess. Lovelock tried to represent the Earth as a self-regulating system and Margullis as a holobiont. [33]
Paying attention to the length of geological processes is essential to deal with climate change. This is one of humanity's most notorious undoings: interfering with the slow circles of life with haste, with an urge to consume, to make what we mostly don't understand productive. With its programmed obsolescence, capitalism is a promoter of arrest and an inhibitor of persistence. In this sense, we can follow Jessica's understanding of her art practice as an endurance performance and, like her, approach environmentalism as an endurance performance. [34]
How long does it take to make gold? Like other heavy elements, gold forms in exploding stars in nucleosynthesis, unfolding over billions of years. This is longer than the geological processes on Earth that produce oil. Jessica's reverse-engineering journey continues as she thinks about these time frames and tries to mimic them. Again, with York's help, she melted basalt rock from the Conga Mine in Perú with glass and other minerals. The key ingredient was gold powder coaxed by precipitation from the earlier aqua regia solution. As Jessica recalls, "Those were the first experiments in 2019."
Later, as a research fellow at the University of Oregon's Center for Art Research, Jessica continued to work on recipes. With this prior knowledge and experience, she began producing the final works to be shown at Locust Projects with the University of Miami's Metal and Glass Studios. The result is a series of experimental rock formations that look like shimmering solidified lava and, in York's words, are the antithesis of what "we've spent millennia trying to get [...] out of rocks." [35] This distinct attempt at Reverse Alchemy seems to push us -humans- out of the picture. Reverse engineering stellar and geological processes that take billions of years may be an allegorical plea to erase humanity–not just its footprint–from the Earth.
Jessica's efforts to reintegrate gold into the ecosystem by placing it on the ground have similarities to Tsinamekuta, a work by Mexican sound artist Marcela Armas. A pyrrhotite rock is taken from a mine that occupies a mountain where the Wixárika community performs ancient rituals. Pyrrhotite is known for its intense magnetic properties and recording changes in the earth's magnetic field, which interests Marcela for a specific purpose: to record human heartbeats in the rock. Together with Mara'akame Jairra, a shaman from the Wixárika community, Marcela performs a ceremony to ask permission for the recording and to recognize the mountain for the lending of the rock. After activating a strange-looking and specifically designed instrument that performs the recording, Marcela takes the rock back to the mountain, which now contains both Jairra's and her own heartbeats. [36]
Both Jessica and Marcela are reversing extractivism and directing their gesture toward the minions of capitalism to highlight their ecological undoings, their role in the destruction of life forms, of customs and rituals, of place, of the tangled web of the holobiont called Gaia. Can capitalism be reversed? Reverse-engineering capitalism might reveal mechanisms helpful in building alternative worlds. The disarming of constituent parts of the object of study, to analyze each one and their relations to develop a sequence of steps that made the object. This is also what Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers are attempting to do when they call for paying attention to our doings so coexistence in Gaia is possible. [37]
LIMINAL COMMENSALITY
Agnotology, the study of the deliberate production of ignorance or doubt typically used to sell a product, can shed light on everything wrong with ecological activism. [38] Eco-normativity and science miscommunication are effective ways of leaving out parts of the picture that are inconvenient, impractical, or not patriarchal enough. If you ignore it, you do not miss it, but even if you were aware of it, you could still be driven not to understand it.
A group portrait of environmentalism must include the negationists to be complete[39]. It most certainly includes the mainstream, so it must include minorities to be socially just. It must be multi-species in a non-anthropomorphic way to reflect a team capable of facing the challenges of the Capitalocene. But how can environmentalism be inclusive of those who oppose it, multi-species, and socially just without being... weird?
Picture the negationists you love to hate and imagine them interacting with celebrated activists who travel the world giving speeches and meet local fighters who have no choice but to stay put. And between these Homo Erectus specimens and their communication and traveling machines are other animals, plants, insects, fungi, bacteria, and minerals, all expressing their concerns. There is a good chance that this image would have trouble being taken seriously. And maybe that's what's needed when fingers are pointed at shifting targets: not to be taken seriously.
Where in this picture do we find Jessica Segall and her Reverse Alchemy project? Is she seriously developing a project involving animals, plants, minerals, and other people to reintroduce gold into the ecosystem? Yes, the science and art in this are deadly serious and in keeping with her entire body of work, which is not severe in a solemn or doctrinaire way[40]. We have paid attention to the interaction with animals, minerals, and humans, but we still have to look at plants and their performance. How do plants take part in the broad scheme of gold reverse engineering? To understand this, we must first look at phytoextraction as contamination remediation and an experimental mode of sustainable mining.
As it turns out, there are plant species capable of retaining heavy metals they absorb from the ground. Some of these plants are called hyperaccumulators and are being studied and used to retrieve toxic waste from contaminated soil and groundwater. For this to work, plants must be harvested and disposed of properly after accumulating the metals[41]. Hyperaccumulators use is, in the best of cases, a parallel process that complements contemporary large-scale mining and is focused on remediation. Conversely, agro-mining uses these plants to extract commercially valuable metals in quantities and time frames that can't replace mega-mining.
Jessica's exhibition at Locust Projects (Miami) in 2021 included a garden of Brassica juncea, or Indian mustard, which is considered a hyperaccumulator; horsetail, which is used in phytoremediation; and other plants that do not extract heavy metals, such as the purple hyacinth bean. The garden was watered with a solution loaded with parts per million of gold, and plants were expected to grow into a kind of didactic display of the future of mining [42]. Among these plants, complementing the installation, was a transparent rectangular container filled with more of the reverse-engineered gold solution and water hyacinth plants, which bloomed throughout the exhibition as the garden grew.
To notice plant extraction will not be able to meet the demand for metals required by a decarbonized economy as long as it is designed to grow indefinitely. Mega-mining fits perfectly into the capitalist mindset of productive perpetual growth. A death sentence for critical zones where desired metals are found. One such metal is niobium, sought for its high corrosion resistance in prosthetic applications and to high temperatures as used in superalloys for turbines and engines. Niobium has been called the new gold for its iridescence in jewelry applications and because it is more affordable. But what makes niobium essential to our current way of life–to its survival–is that "Niobium is an important element in high-performance lithium-ion batteries for the future of energy technology." [43]
Perhaps instead of wish-fool thinking about Hummers or SUVs with big and efficient batteries and eco-travel to visit the world's seven wonders, we could pay attention to what is implied in our consumption habits. And for those of us who think a techno-fix is on the horizon, we still need to consider what is being fixed, swept under the rug or kicked down the road. For those of us, like Jessica, who advocate for a de-growth of the economy–again going in a reverse direction–we need to stop thinking in productive terms that exclude non-human existence. As Isabelle Stengers has called growth objectors, those who believe in minimizing flights, reviving public transportation, frequent biking, and everyday walking. Be a growth objector; reject technowashing![44]
The language has become replete with increasingly odd words: technowashing, greenwashing, and wokewashing. Messages essential to changing consumer habits get lost in translation as they pass through media and marketing communications logic. Let's think about Levi's campaign featuring some of the youngest climate activists like Xiye Bastida, Melati Wijsen, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, social justice advocate Marcus Rashford, Hollywood celebrity Jaden Smith, and social media influencer Emma Chamberlain. Should we apply wokewashing or greenwashing to the apparent co-option of people working to combat climate change to promote the longevity of a brand's products? Should we laugh at Levi's when Jaden Smith says, "It's cool to be sustainable," or should we take it seriously? [45]. In the liminal space we live in, is it ok if we also feel pranked by other odd made-up words like natureculture or conceptual names like climate justice or queer ecology?
Nicole Seymour, who has written extensively about queer ecology and eco-criticism, makes a strong case for using irony to deal with the "gloom and doom" that dominates climate change discourse in all spheres. In Bad Environmentalism, Seymour evokes other understandings of environmental issues, highlighting work by artists such as Isabella Rossellini's video series Green Porno 2008, in which she stages various creatures and describes their physical characteristics and behaviors in the first person, with particular attention to sex. [46] With Bad Environmentalism, Seymour shows ways to resist environmentalism's co-optation by corporate and political interests and pay attention to non-human life experiences.
With Reverse Alchemy, Jessica Segall is paying attention to gold, one of the grand fetishes of humanity, a metal that originated in a supernova. This object shines with a life-inspiring light but also brings darkness and death. Jessica also turns her attention to how plants and animals can be summoned to our aid in releasing life from the capitalist hold. She intuitively considers how the axiom of eternal growth, even green growth, is offset. The only thing perhaps not evident in Jessica's work is, as Vinciane Despret suggests in one of her books[47], if she asked Lion and Lucero, the horses, for their consent to eat gold.
OUTRO
"Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger."
The Joker The Dark Knight
Who has not heard the rumor about King Midas's donkey ears? The story, as told by Ovid, goes like this: Midas, long after he had grown disgusted with wealth, found himself an unexpected judge in a contest between Apollo, the god of knowledge, music, and other arts, and Pan, the god of nature and rustic life, sometimes thought to be a satyr–a lesser but rebellious spirit. They were competing to see who could make the most beautiful music, and after hearing the other judge's verdict in favor of Apollo, Midas dared to favor Pan. Though troubled by Midas's verdict, Apollo questioned his hearing and mischievously gave Midas a more extensive set of ears, like a donkey's.
Midas, ashamed of his new donkey ears, hid them under a purple turban, only dutifully eluded by the servant in charge to trim his hair. And this servant, not daring to reveal the secret, but needing to unburden it, went to a quiet place, dug a hole, and whispered the secret there to be buried. But life had its way, and the reeds that grew there, stirred by the wind, spread the secret for all to hear.
So how does the story end? Was Midas punished because he went from being a disdainful capitalist to a naïve environmentalist? If we consider this to understand the famous myth, typically seen as a cautionary tale about mindless greed, perhaps we can find redemption for Midas, picturing him as a wise fool. Maybe what ashamed him can be something we should strive for today: bonding with our non-human neighbors.
Antar Kuri, Montevideo, May, 2023.
——————————————————————
Notes:
[1] Ovid's Metamorphoses is the primary written source of the King Midas myth, famously expanded by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose tale has far more reach in the English language than Ovid's. There are countless other authors and variations, but all deal with the two main themes: greed and folly.
[2] Dionysus is the ecstatic liberator, the god of fertility—a Greek deity known as Bacchus in Roman mythology.
[3] A sense of direction on this matter in the medieval times of alchemy could come from St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, where a question about the morality of selling “what is not” makes an example of the alchemists' advertised interest in gold transmutation (link accessed: April 20, 2023)
[4] This cry was heard and transformed into "not another mine, not another death" in El Salvador, the first nation to ban all metal mining as of 2017 (link accessed: April 29, 2023). Unexpected ways of keeping the gold in the ground are to be found with creative uses of emerging technologies in startups deploying green gold tokenization (link accessed: May 3, 2023).
[5] The seven metals of antiquity are gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin, and lead. These metals enabled human development in various areas and got paired with celestial bodies transcending practical uses: gold-Sun, silver-Moon, quicksilver-Mercury, copper-Venus, iron-Mars, tin-Jupiter, lead-Saturn (link accessed: April 16, 2023).
[6] Gold is used in jewelry, coinage, bullion, backing, electronics, computers, dentistry, medical applications, and aerospace technology (link accessed: April 10, 2023)
[7] Timothy Morton's Wikipedia entry defines hyperobjects as" objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificities, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium" (link accessed: May 1, 2023)
[8] Jessica's artist talk at UC Davis (link minute 24:17 and 32:53). But if gold is changing hands from empire to empire, it might have been doing so for the last 5,000 years, starting with Egypt and its conquests and conquerors (link accessed: May 10, 2023).
[9] Mercury poisoning is the worst, as seen in the humanitarian emergency related to artisanal gold mining in the Amazon, which should be addressed as genocide of local indigenous groups (link accessed: May 1, 2023)
[10] Biochar, a mix of soil with charcoal derived from animal bone and tree bark, is regarded as an enhancer of the natural carbon-seizing ability of soil (link accessed: April 30, 2023). Sun Gro, a company marketing an industrialized version of biochar called Black-gold fertilizer, is involved in controversial peat moss mining in peat bogs, which are important carbon sinks (link accessed: April 30, 2023).
[11] Golden Rice is a genetically modified superfood that has been on hold for decades because of uncertainties about GMOs. Fierce opponents like Vandana Shiva–dubbed the Gandhi of grains–highlight how unnecessary techno-fixes can hamper biodiversity (link and link accessed: April 25, 2023).
[12] As stated in an article published by The Guardian, "Fortunes could be saved from going down the drain by extracting gold and precious metals from human excrement" (link accessed: April 29, 2023). Reading the scientific study referred to; we learn that this is an exaggerated statement because "the probability of finding a submicron particle of silver or gold is of the order of 105 or 106 times lower than that of finding a TiO2 nanoparticle" (link accessed: April 30, 2023).
[13] Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004)
[14] ¿Quién le debe a quién? [Who Owes Whom?] is a book by Inquilinxs Agrupadxs and Asamblea Feminista de la Villa 31 y 31-bis in Buenos Aires, Cavallero, Gago, and Silvia Federici. This book features contributions from members of the Debt Collective (United States), the Instituto Eqüit (Brazil), and the Instituto Amaq' (Guatemala), among others.
[15] Capitalist sorcery. Breaking the spell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
[16] In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Open Humanities Press, 2015)
[17] Mesh is a metaphor put forward by Timothy Morton in his book The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2012)
[18] Surrounded by the threatening forces of Yanacocha company and its Conga mining project, Máxima's family is in constant danger. In 2019, HAWAPI brought a group of 13 artists to Máxima Acuña's property, including Jessica. HAWAPI is an independent cultural association that develops encuentros for multidisciplinary artists in politically complex territories (link accessed: April 12, 2023).
[19] Horse dung was used to maintain an optimal temperature for the alchemical digestion process. One of twelve core alchemical processes, digestion is ruled by the zodiac sign of Leo. Jessica has said elsewhere that she is "personally interested in the use of the lion in alchemy, and the second horse's name was Lion." The lion in alchemical symbolism conveys the transformative power of alchemy. More specifically, the green lion devouring a sun is a metaphor for aqua regia, capable of dissolving various metals, including gold.
[20] In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press Books, 2016), scholar Donna Haraway argues against the term Anthropocene, which adheres to an anthropocentric gaze, and replaces it with the term Chthulucene to describe a time when humans and non-humans are intertwined.
[21] Arte Povera, a text written in 1969 by Germano Celant, is credited with giving the name to this art movement.
[22] The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)
[23] The philosopher's stone was not a stone; best guesses have it as a powder or a liquid. Around the time that Hieronymus Bosch finished "The Extraction of the Stone of Folly" around 1500–which, by the way, is also not a stone but a tulip bulb–Theophrastus von Hohenheim was born. Paracelsus was known as a physician, alchemist lay theologian, and philosopher who contributed to the emergence of modern medicine by uniting it with chemistry. Paracelsus's alchemical experiments found practical applications in the art of curing diseases.
[24] Silvia Federici in conversation with Ni Una Menos collective organized by CCA in Rosario, Argentina (link min. 50'13").
[25] The Midas myth is part of the Dionysian cycle of legends believed to predate Greece. These legends celebrated what was outside civilized society and a return to nature.
[26] Hawthorne's Midas is not appalled by starvation; he only takes action after turning his beloved daughter into gold. This plot twist is known in contemporary narrative theory as "fridging." It consists of taking away a female character's agency and using that energy to advance a male character's narrative arc.
[27] According to Wikipedia, Aqua Regia is a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, optimally in a molar ratio of 1:3. Alchemists developed it to dissolve metals such as gold. Current uses are in gold refining, etching, and in some laboratories to clean glassware of organic compounds and metal particles.
[28] Designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1907, it was commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt to achieve a higher artistic standard. The original design, intended for the $20 Gold Double Eagle, is now a collector's item that can reach 5,000 USD in auction houses (link). As a pendant, these coins can cost 3,900 USD (link). The one dissolved in Reverse Alchemy seems to be a 1999 edition of the $50 denomination.
[29] York's work focuses on sustainable/green engineering. Gold appears in his research papers in the context of biosensors, and lithium seems more prevalent in his work (link accessed: April 23, 2023).
[30] The video showed at ZAZ Corner (link). The video showed at Locust Projects (link).
[31] The Critical Zone Collaborative Network (C.Z. Net) is a U.S. research program with various geological, climatic, and land use settings. The National Science Foundation Award sponsors it. Bruno Latour collaborated with Daniel D. Richter from Duke University (link accessed: May 7, 2023)
[32] Société d'Objets Cartographiques. Alexandra Arènes website (link accessed: April 10, 2023).
[33] A holobiont is a collection of closely related species with complex interactions. It is a community of multiple interacting partners in which the host organism and its associated microorganisms function as a co-evolving entity at the community level.
[34] At its most direct meaning, endurance performance refers to the ability to maintain physical activity over an extended period. An artistic practice involves the artist or performer putting their body under strain for prolonged periods.
[35] @THEU link
[36] In-depth descriptions and narrations about Tsinamekuta can be accessed through the project's web page (link) and at an interview for Laboratorios Sonoros, Música UNAM (link).
[37] In Capitalist sorcery. Breaking the spell, the authors highlight the importance of paying attention. Paying attention can lead to action and a change of attitude. Paying attention is what makes you less of a minion since we all are minions of capitalism.
[38] Agnotology is a term proposed by science historian Robert N. Proctor, best known for his work exposing the tobacco industry.
[39] Here are some links to data that help paint a complete picture: Climate Deniers in the 117th Congress (link), The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States (link), Top 10 Climate Deniers (link).
[40] Jessica shared anecdotes of the production stages of her work and her research interests in an open talk at UC Davis (link).
[41] The following link shows a global database for plants that hyper-accumulate metal and metalloid trace elements (link accessed: April 28, 2023).
[42] In Reverse Alchemy's most recent installment, Jessica references the work by various researchers working with hyperaccumulator plants: Christopher Anderson, Professor in Environmental Science at Massey University, New Zealand. Ramiro Ramírez Pisco, Juan Pablo Gómez Yarce, Juan José Guáqueta Restrepo and Daniel Gaviria Palacio at Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.
[43] This is how Dr. Stephen Campbell, CTO of Nano One Materials Corporation, sees the future (link accessed: May 2, 2023). We would do better to ask the Yanomami and the other 20 indigenous communities living on the largest niobium deposit in the Amazon basin. As some have called this attitude, this qualifies as green imperialism (link), a controversial derogatory term that can be used against or in favor of an environmental awareness that still undermines and exploits the Global South.
[44] There is a distinction between science communication and the communication of science as a mass product. Techno optimism, as well as mass consumption, are aligned with capital interest. This way, science communication manipulates public opinion (link accessed: April 28, 2023).
[45] Then again, one could argue that there is no single bulletproof way to get consumers to change their habits, so anything goes. As one person commented on the youtube video of the referred Levi's' campaign, "Levi's could make a killing from the previous generation of jeans and the consumer obsolescence of those products by going a step into repair kits," but are they doing that, or just selling more jackets? Apparently, Levi's did step in, albeit timidly, when in 2014 offered buyers complimentary buttons, needles, and thread through specialized tailor shops (link accessed: May 2, 2023)
[46] Several episodes of the Green Porno series are available on youtube. There is also an informative interview with Isabella Rossellini about her series, where she explains with no less humor and simply what she is doing (link).
[47] What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2016) by Vinciane Despret, a science philosopher interested in human-animal relations.
——————————————————————
Images:
1. Reverse Alchemy on The Gold Coast, 2021
Installation view; Phytomining Plants, cast lava, video projection, soil, dissolved gold
Dimensions variable
A garden of phytomining plants absorbs dissolved gold from the soil.
Image credit: Zack Balber
2. Reverse Alchemy in Conga (Máxima), 2019
Inkjet Print
20" x 30"
Activist Máxima Acuña holds a gold-leafed apple at her camposito in the center of the Conga Gold Mine. The apple was fed to her horse, Lucero.
3. Reverse Alchemy on The Gold Coast, 2021
Detail view; cast lava, gold, jewel box
24" x 36" x 6"
A series of experimental stones is presented in a jewel case, cast from gold and molten basalt (lava). These stones place the extracted gold matter back into stone.
Image credit: Zack Balber
4. Reverse Alchemy on The Gold Coast, 2021
Image still, 4K video, 14:00
Real-time video documentation of dissolving 24 K gold
5. Reverse Alchemy with a Horse Named Lion, 2019
Horse, edible gold leaf, straw and hay, shit
Dimensions Variable
Performance still: A horse inside the gallery is fed straw coated in edible gold leaf. The gold leaf is broken into fine particles through the horse's bodily metabolism. Its manure is then spread through the grounds to cultivate the gardens.
All images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted—————————————————————
Jessica Segall is an artist that needs discipline based in Brooklyn, NY. Hostile and threatened landscapes are the sites for her work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself, examining a queer ecology. Jessica’s work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with scientists, activists, and non-human beings. She exhibits her work internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, The Coreana Museum of Art, The Havana Bienal, and The Queens Museum of Art, to name a few.
—————————————————————
