Xenolith

Xenolith

https://vimeo.com/953150678

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 new complex of earth infrastructures are 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, Xenolith and Capital—each of whom has its own song. Each figure is both a material and a lensing technology with its own opacities, refractions, and focus. The story will unfold in space through a dramaturgy of documentary vignettes and interactive melodic holograms. This story interweaves poetic speculation with research, dialogues with scientists, and footage from geotechnical infrastructures.

Xenolith with be both a book with an XR app as well as a multimedia spatial exhibition. Thus far with the support of the Austrian Film Board and Creative Capital, I filmed the Carbfix site in Iceland and interviewed its lead scientist, developed a working model for an XR app in Unity, composed with Samuel Hertz the song of Capital, and created a demo version of an XR libretto (shared here). The fully realized book and exhibition will premiere in 2026.

This artwork prompts critical, creative and queer thinking about the promises, fictions and realities of technological solutions to climate crisis. Enter the xenolith: an inhuman character that nonetheless figures the contaminated alterities present within bodies marked and maimed by sedimentations of power and toxicity. This xenolith is a synthetic stone born of the market for deterritorialized and externalized waste. Calcite comes in a great variety of crystalline forms and colors. Just one is called Iceland Spar—optically transparent crystallized carbon that was used as the first polarizing lens by Vikings and scientific instruments. The choice of industry to represent greenhouse gases transmuted into the form of Spar expresses a carbon imaginary of cleansing that resonates with the sublime fragility of glaciers threatened by global warming. We know that excess carbon emissions are not the only ecological threat that originates from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial capitalism in general. A fiction of purity is the offset hologram here: carbon becomes capital becomes a crystalline lens.

Whereas the geoengineered calcite synthesized into the basalt core sample is opaque, soft, and banal like limestone. Carbon and sulfur are stuffed together inside of opportunistic holes as thick, milky stones of atmospheric excess. Thinking with queer metabolism of contamination: to consider the body of basalt as a capacious sponge for matter out of place. It conjures the desire paths of queer alchemy, wherein the trouble of geological animacies threaten dominant notions of purity and order, while it also conjures the violence in which contaminations are imposed upon the bodies of subhuman racialized, gendered, and disabled others. The xenolith glitches the ontological orders of climate pollution by fogging the lenses of our frames as we look to the geographies and logics of where and how contaminants and toxicities are offset and displaced.

#carbon #visualart #geology #atmosphere #carboncapture

https://creative-capital.org/projects/xenolith/

@caitlinberrigan (Instagram)

Carbon capture and sequestration through mineralization is a process routinely carried out by volcanoes. Much of my research centers around a power plants proposing to integrate CCS and mineralization into their operations to close the loops of carbon emissions. Given the magnitude of existing carbon emissions and the large volumes of basalt and energy required to mineralize carbon, the technology leaves many open questions about feasibility and positive impact. The fossil fuel industry first developed the technique to maximize fuel extraction from emptied reservoirs. It is now a burgeoning industry with billions of euros of investment to cap and bank greenhouse gases from existing polluters. Although geoengineering is proposed to combat global warming, it leaves extractive infrastructures intact and creates new supply chains and economies for contaminants. This project prompts us to look more closely at the process, promises, and potential for these technologies with both optimism and critique.

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Xenolith follows how minerals are transformed and mobilized by different conceptual and political agendas in the climate crisis, and to inscribe geology as media—sculptural, visual, digital, textual. If minerals have agencies, what are their modes of communication, and what are their narrations? This work is for me a meaningful extension of my artistic research to consider how to make sensible forces of the unseen, the micropolitical, the mineral, and the inhuman. I work across video, sculpture, and poetic texts to bring these porous membranes across beings into the realms of meaning through aesthetics, media, metaphor, semiosis, and affective encounters. I operate within the intimacies across the inhuman and the non-living. Informed by methodologies of queer and disability theories, my work aims to translate aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? I work to engage with the embodied ecologies of power, nature, and technology. My work proposes what other presents and futures become possible once we begin to think beyond the framework of the human and the animal, and into our shared subjectivities with the non-living.