with ediz ustundag and sila alvar.
proper archiving pending; manifesto below.
ALTERED MATTER: Post-Anthropocentric Alchemy
Fire is an agent of total alchemical transformation.
It is the disruptor of binaries. It is the upender of stability--it unsettles and disturbs, transforms one material in something other. It shows the ontological instability of the world--that all materials, including the human, are exchangable, transmutable, transformable. It reveals the human, human creation, and human media as material suspectible to alchemical alteration.
It consumes--it eats--it burns--it destroys--it warms--it creates--it cooks. In human history, there have been countless attempts at describing what fire actions. What it does; what it is.
The chemists, the sociologists, the historians, the magicians, the priests--all describe fire in their own tongues, always through the lens of human sapience and technicity. But fire exceeds its appropriation as a human tool. Fire is not a "species attribute." It is something beyond that. The intelligence and timescale of fire vastly exceed the human.
This world is an alchemical one--it is a world of constant transformations that sometimes stabilize for long enough to congeal into form. Fire is the motion of the world--it is an agent of transformation--a prophet which shows us the undeniable instability of form.
This project is an attempt at meeting fire in its own register, to think of fire beyond the myopic limits of human timescales and morals. Discarding the gods of modernity, we resist the chemists who instrumentalize fire as a laboratory tool, the historians who read the history of fire as the history of human civilization, the classicists that idealize a Promethean thievery of fire as the founding of the arts of men--in favor of an alchemical engagement of fire which is self-aware that standing before fire, there is no privileged matter. There are only different kinds of transformations, only new states to be made.
Fire does not destroy. It does not create. It only transforms.
We present you with an alchemical theory of fire as embodied agency--it is the combustion of one state into another, transformation that materializes. Process that materializes.
This project is:
1. A physical cache of moments in the process of alteration by flame. It is a memorization of halfway-forms--of the incomplete and almost-done--of the undercooked and the inchoate.
2. An archive and reference library that shows reactions between different kinds of clay and natural local materials. It is a documentation of alchemical motion--the endless and continuous transformation of forms into new forms by fire.
3. An alchemist's manifesto. It is a postanthropocentric, translingual attempt at speaking the tongue of fire--reiterating its total equanimity through a constant process of making new forms--recognizing that there is no beginning and end; no creation and destruction; only different kinds of transformations, only altered states of matter.