Xenolith
Song of Capital
Work-in-Progress

Xenolith depicts a contradiction within climate crisis: when the contaminant is the self. An alchemical documentary opera is told across film installation and a libretto augmented by holograms.

Inviting being-with the inhuman, it traces the queer metabolism of capitalist toxicities through the lens of the xenolith—a geological term for alien stone. Alchemy is a queer science, coaxing promiscuous phase transitions in both material form and value: from excess to rarity, from waste to riches. This is a story about the queerness of geoengineering and its troubled relationship to technogovernance. A geothermal power plant in Iceland is part of a new complex of earth infrastructures where excess carbon dioxide gas is capped, liquefied, and injected into subterranean bedrock. Carbon transmutes into liquid capital through the alchemy of cap and trade. Here it mineralizes as calcite within the porous cavities of basalt stone, forming a synthetic xenolith: a transformed body whose holes are filled with foreign matter. The deadly specter of climate crisis is alchemized into milky pearls of carbon and sulfur. As a material metaphor, the xenolith evokes optimism for adapting to life in a toxic world, but its locus within channels of capital delivers “a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure.” (Lauren Berlant)

Through the lens of queer metabolisms, Xenolith questions the human-machine dynamic when earthly matter itself becomes geotechnics. Four figures compose the cast of this story—Basalt, Calcite, Capital, and Xenolith—each of whom has its own song. The story will unfold in space through a dramaturgy of documentary vignettes and interactive melodic holograms. An XR book—printed with photographs, textures, and dilations between librettos, scripts, and texts—activates the songs of the four figures that appear as holographic projections inside of glass sculptures as the visitor turns the pages. This story interweaves poetic speculation with research, dialogues with scientists, and footage from geotechnical infrastructures.