Alkemie Information

Alkemie is an atelier of creators of performances, installations, and infrastructures that transform public events beyond what can be expected from mechanical means. Our practice presumes that our social and ecological relations are suffused with ethical and aesthetic value. The material of which these relations are made – and the way that they are made – also matter, ethically and aesthetically. As our communities reel under the strain of the collapse of ‘rational’ credit markets and the general destabilization of systems of exchange that we have taken for granted for so long, there's now a renewed urgency to reposition the value of creating art in society. Art can no longer only be about me, you, or even us, as if human beings were the only being in the world, because the world changes us as we change the world. Alchemy is the art of transmuting bodies and substances, the quick and the dead, the inert becoming vital, accidentals and essences becoming quintessences. 300 years ago, alchemy was a practical and magical art, concerned with bodies and materials that are always suffused with ethical, vital and material power. Under the prism of the Enlightenment, such practices split into the practical (e.g. engineering or medicine), the scientific, and the art of the imaginary. Our work fuses these arts together again to recast the material transmutation of social relations.