Film Still: Xenolith (2024)
Alchemy is a queer science, coaxing promiscuous phase transitions in form and value.
About Xenolith
project elements
Alchemy is a queer science, coaxing promiscuous phase transitions in form and value: from excess to rarity, from waste to riches. A new complex of earth infrastructures is underway where excess carbon dioxide gas is capped, liquefied and injected into subterranean basalt. Carbon transmutes into capital through the alchemy of cap and trade. It mineralizes as calcite within the porous cavities of stone, forming a synthetic xenolith: a transformed body whose holes are filled with foreign matter. Xenolith is a work-in-progress that will be a documentary opera told across film installation, photographs and a libretto augmented by XR holograms. This story is about the queerness of geoengineering and its troubled relationship to technogovernance. Four figures compose the cast with individual songs—Basalt, Calcite, Xenolith and Capital. Each figure is both a material and a lensing technology with its own opacities, refractions and focus. Xenolith interweaves poetics with field research from geotechnical infrastructures.
