Jessica Segall

Reverse Alchemy is a scientific process/art project I developed from 2019 - 2021, where I refined gold into clean water and fertile soil through chemical and mechanical processes.

This project is a gesture against capitalistic extractivism and its effects on human and non-human life. Inspired by grass-roots ecological movements and legal battles from the Andes, the absurd premise of “putting gold back in the earth” is achieved by three means: turning gold into potable water through dissolution, putting old back into stone through casting molten stone with gold, and feeding gold to plants and animals, who digest the gold and place it back into the ground as fertilizer.

This project began with a research trip to the contested Conga Gold mine with activist Máxima Acuña; a subsistence, Andean farmer and inspiration for the current anti-mining movement in Peru. Facilitated by the Peruvian non-profit organization, Hawapi, this experience led to further scientific collaborations in my attempt to reverse engineer gold. These processes culminated in exhibitions in Peru, The US and France. Exhibitions included gardens of phytomining plants, live horses, videos of the reverse engineering process, cast sculptures and other ephemera in installation form.

The installation features video projections filmed during the reverse engineering process, in which gold from Imperial mints dissolves in an Aqua Regia solution. The selected plants, including Brassicajuncea or Indian Mustard, horsetail, and purple hyacinth bean, have all been utilized in studies exploring the potential for gold mining through cultivation rather than extraction.

In addition to the gold-fed garden, a series of experimental stones is presented in a jewel case, cast from gold and basalt. These stones recreate the original geological process of land formation, and effectively place the gold matter back into quartz-like veins in the molten stone.

Reverse Alchemy is unique in that I am working with new experimental sculptural and material processes that have not yet been researched or documented - as the history of gold only favors accumulation and refinement. As a result, Reverse Alchemy has already produced the first scientific write-up on reverse engineering gold (York Smith, University of Utah, 2019). This write-up defined the scientific method and outcome of experiments in dissolving and reconstituting gold in soil and stone, produced during collaborative experiments with York Smith in the University’s metallurgy department. Other ephemera and documentation from these experiments were included in the exhibition Hawapi X, at the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano and at ZAZ10ts.

Images at Locust Projects by Zachary Balber

Thanks to The University of Miami / Jenna Efrein for the lava pour, The University of Oregon / Brian Gillis for the glass studio research, and the University of Utah / York Smith for research on reverse engineering gold

2018

Two channel video installation

7:48

Camera: Steve Romano

Sound: Iddo Aharony

This performance was shot in private wildlife reserves in the six states that allow private ownership of large predators. I trained to handle the wildlife in order to embed myself in the ready-made sites, a complex of entertainment and conservation economies.

Today in the United States, in an era of ravaged ecology and increasingly de-regulated capitalism; there is an onus on volunteers to pick up environmental responsibility that at one point was upheld by communities or civic organizations. Free market environmentalists, assume a self-prescribed role of both individualist, and rouge animal guardian. Private wildcat reserves create an ecological diversity of fauna never co-existent under one biome. Here, tigers and lions roam a mowed landscape of the American South. Moreover, such preserved wilderness creates a frame around a private property, around which all other wildlife can be desecrated. (un)common intimacy is named after the both the loss of a wild commons and the unusual intimacy gained through free market environmentalism and the ownership of wild animals.

2015

Fire, aluminum duct, recycled Christmas trees, wood

Indoor, public fire-pit and temporary public park installed at Recess’s Soho storefront location. For two weeks, visitors were invited on a 24 hour basis to camp out, roast marshmallows and sing around the fire. The motivation for this project lay within the difficulty of communing with our original creative commons (the campfire) in New York City, due to safety precautions and bureaucratic paperwork to install a fireplace. Half a Cord necessitated six months of planning and working with city officials, contractors and neighbors to allow the exhibition to take place. We also installed a 40’ ventilating pipe system through the building’s exterior wall onto the roof.

Half a Cord created a warm, communal space for New Yorkers, as well as a first campfire experience for urban youth.

3:00 loop
Sound: Iddo Aharony

Say When is set throughout the United States’ Solar Energy Zones—250,000 acres of public land designated for solar infrastructure that is almost entirely unused. There, Segall walks through the desert landscape holding a mirror to the sky, personifying a heliostat, a centuries old technology that can be used to generate energy from the sun, to revive a dormant power plant.

You can follow the development of our public’s land’s proposed solar infrastructure here.

Say When was commissioned by Little Sun as part of Fast Forward Short Film Series. It was screened at the TED Countdown Summit, the UN Climate Change Conference COP 26, and is included in Little Sun’s educational climate curriculum in use in Ethiopia, Dakar and Germany.

Read about Say When and watch the video

2016 - 2024

(When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Chandeliers)

fruits, root vegetables, metals: rewired, vegetal powered chandeliers

dimensions variable

site - specific installations

In 2016, I rewired two antique chandeliers in Essex Market, to illuminate Cuchifritos using produce from the market as a power source, prior to the market’s relocation for a new high - rise building.

In 2023, The chandeliers were remade in collaboration with Paulina Olowska, using clay and blown glass to tell the story of vegetal energy.

In 2024, two original chandeliers from the Harvestwork's Nolan House on Governors Island were rewired as part of the exhibition, Elements: Art and Tech

2016 - 2023

piano, 30,000 bees, speakers

Fugue in B Flat is a grand piano modified into a beehive. The sound of the bees interacting with the piano strings is amplified via live feed from a contact microphone on the piano soundboard. Fugue is a time–based sculpture with visual and audio feedback of a natural system of logic and survival colonizing a man-made system of order and harmony. Fugue has implications not only to declining insect populations and our relationship with nature as consumers and urban dwellers, but in trust and our contractual relationship to each other in a network of overlapping intimacies.  

The sculpture made its debut in Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City. Commissioned in 2016, it was a celebration of both the 25th Anniversary of Socrates Sculpture Park and New York City’s legalization of beekeeping. A transcription of the score, played by bees inside the piano, was developed at Regelbau 411 in Denmark, for the exhibition Terropolis in 2022, as both classic notation and as a graphic score. It was performed by composer Yiannis Loukos for the solo exhibition, Zu Summen, at Scope Berlin and filmed at the Udk in 2022.

Video of installation

Video of performance

2016

Sculpture, video and large format photographs

Zzzzzzzzzz is a mobile, functional sculpture. It consists of a custom-made captain’s bed. Its drawers are outfitted with langstroth - style beehive frames. Four activehoneybee colonies live under the bed.

Bees have the same diurnal cycle as humans. They leave the hive in late morning to go to work. They return to the hive at dusk. After dark, the bees remain in the hive, making the bed suitable for human activity.

In 2016, I took the sculpture on an itinerary following the mobile beekeeping industry. America’s agriculture relies on mobile beekeeping. Trucks transport honeybees on-demand across the country, where crops are planted in regions without natural pollinators, or not enough pollinators to meet product demand. Destinations for Zzzzzzz included the largest animal migration on earth: the February almond bloom in California.

Reverse Alchemy is unique in that I am working with new experimental sculptural and material processes that have not yet been researched or documented - as the history of gold only favors accumulation and refinement. As a result, Reverse Alchemy has already produced the first scientific write-up on reverse engineering gold (York Smith, University of Utah, 2019). This write-up defined the scientific method and outcome of experiments in dissolving and reconstituting gold in soil and stone, produced during collaborative experiments with York Smith in the University’s metallurgy department. Other ephemera and documentation from these experiments were included in the exhibition Hawapi X, at the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano and at ZAZ10ts.

2011-2013

Video and installation

Performance from atop the Global Seed Bank and floating on icebergs in the arctic while wearing a custom survival suit, designed in the style of Goya.

This video is included in the installation The Hardship. In the Hardship, a framed copper cold platecrystallizes, forming a portable iceberg and refractive projection screen for videos from the arctic. Modified refrigerators are speakers for an arctic storm.

2014

Wooden boat, projector, screens

4.9 x 3.6m x 3.6m

Handmade wooden arctic sledging ship for use as an ice-age movie theater

2010

Fairbanks Z stationary engine, inverter, downdraft gasifier, car battery, 16 mm projector

Dimensions variable

A wood-burning film projector, built off of modified FEMA plans, salvaged car parts and metals from a defunct atomic research lab. I built this generator to sustain film and video art in times of petroleum emergency. The film projected from this machine was a 16mm document of myself chopping down the tree to source wood for running the projector.

Video