Following Seven Alchemical Metals # Metallurgy, Media, Minds
This project is part of the Geomediations Collective initiative. In each of the seven found footage films in this series of Metallurgy, Media, Minds I follow one of the seven ancient metals that were known of an d used in alchemy. This project departed from the idea put forward by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus that “every matter consists of metal” or, metal is in everything. In a new materialist perspective, the materiality of matte also implies its metaphoric and immaterial properties, which directly relate back to alchemy. I became interested in the idea of filmmakers as metallurgists that shape, bend, weld and transform our historical and collective consciousness. As an experiment I started out by looking at gold in both its material properties and its significance in human history. The first film in this series (when I was honing my editing skills, as I still am), was Following the Gold. Obviously many more metals could be followed, especially in the context of our modern media world where every machine, every screen, every gadget is full of (rare) earth metals. But the idea of returning to the old alchemical planets gave the project a clear scope.