Personal Information
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Given name: Claire









Surname: Scanlon









Email: c.scanlon62@gmail.com









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Your contribution
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Title: Prospecting alchemy as a ludicrous critique of capitalist-imaginaries: a distillation









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
Scene: the Petra-Chymist Sisters are looking at an alchemical image, Dew Catchers, 1677, which they find intriguing.
F: I wonder if alchemy’s esoteric worldview might supply a novel lens through which to see how capitalism has endangered our planet.
S: Interesting. Might the source of Dew Catchers, The Mutus Liber (‘mute book’), provide a method for us? Shall we make a RC exposition as a picture-play?  We could mine the internet to source copyleft material, noting that the digital commons is also threatened.
F: An image-scape might work, when alchemy’s Rosarium Philosophorum proposes that ‘whenever we have spoken openly we have (actually) said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth’.
S: And we’d build on a legacy of recent work with found images – Farocki, Thompson & Craighead, Magruder, and Warburg’s Mnemosyne? 
F: Yes, montage would enable us to critically modify the relations between discourses and images, as Didi Huberman notes.
S: And visually play with those relations.
F: We could also adopt an interrogative approach for our process, understanding collaboration as a dialogic structure, via a call and response game.
Later, the Sisters are looking at a screen dense with images; varied types, scales, qualities and eras.
S: How does this diversity help us critique the world of Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’?
F: Surely, apparatuses of extraction and refinement point to the way in which capitalist practices continue an alchemical telos –  the Faustian quest for a ‘world of profit and delight’ (Marlowe).
S: But the philosopher’s stone can also be a means to spiritual transformation, as well as a short cut to riches.
F: Look how these images speak critically to the idea of our planet as a ‘natural’ resource for human use.
S: Here alchemy feeds into ecofeminism – Carolyn Merchant – and us as the Petra-Chymist sisters, negotiating our geo-chemical patrimony.
The dialogue continues at SAR26.










Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4223791/4223577)









Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/393/Screenshot%20from%20the%20PCS%2017.34%20project.png









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Mary Anne Francis and Claire Scanlon have collaborated as the Petra-Chymical Sisters since 2024. As artist-researchers, they have worked in UK universities since the 1990s.  Recent outputs include:
  
  MAF: ‘On the Visuality of Writing: A Visual Essay’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 2022; This is Not an Art Show, Handel Street Projects London 2022; Mixed Forms of Visual Culture: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity Bloomsbury 2023.
  
  CAS: ‘Demands of the Diagram: Creative Abduction in Artists’ Research and Practice’ Journal of Visual Art Practice 2021; ‘Diagramming in the Margins of Philosophy’ Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 2018.
  
  Both work with/in and on artistic-research as an-other kind of knowing. 










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
An extended version of this exposition has recently been peer-reviewed by JAR and accepted for publication after reworking. We are currently in the reworking window (deadline 20th March 2026). 

We have sent an email to SAR 26 asking if we can make an application on this basis and have not had a reply as of Sunday 1st March, so have proceeded with this submission on the basis it is acceptable.














Requirements
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Additional information:
We simply require two chairs and the ability to project the live exposition.










Spatial and technical requirements :
High resolution projector and screen, dimmable audiorium lights.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
None.










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