Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist
(A Reflective Field Report and Philosophical Essay- performances Holstebro DK, 2025)
Introductory Note
Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist situates itself at the intersection of embodied practice, ecological thought, and philosophical inquiry, asking how human bodies and actions might shift from extractive agents to regenerative participants within a damaged planetary system. Drawing on alchemical traditions in which spirit and matter are understood as co-constitutive, the trainings function as experimental sites where attention, listening, and relationality are practiced as material forces.
The essay that follows is a reflective field report written as from the inside of this process. Moving between phenomenological description and critical reflection, it examines how these embodied experiments destabilize dominant materialist ontologies that render matter inert and life disposable. What emerges is a contemporary alchemy understood as a political and ethical practice: a reorientation of perception capable of reshaping habits, imaginaries, and modes of co-existence in a time of ecological crisis.
Essay
I enter the room quietly, as one might step into a laboratory, a chapel, or a dream. It is difficult to say which it is – perhaps all three. The air feels charged with a subtle anticipation, as if the molecules themselves are awake, waiting. Around me, others are entering too, their footsteps soft, their gestures tentative, as if each of us senses we are about to cross a threshold – nervous, ready to explore, to explode.
This is Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist, a work that refuses easy classification. It’s a reduction to describe it as theatre or a workshop, as science or ritual, and yet it borrows from all of these. They say it's a training session, but I have never trained this way. Is it everything, as perhaps with life, then a training? Training for what?
It is a space where the body is invited to think, and where thinking is invited to move; to touch, to transform – a space of gestures, of emergent experiments, of collective exploration into the mysterious terrain between matter and spirit.
We begin not with explanations but with actions. A simple instruction is offered, and we follow. Hands reach, bodies bend, voices murmur, feet shift across the floor. The exercises – “trainings,” they are called – unfold like alchemical processes: distillation, dissolution, recombination. Yet what is being transformed is not lead into gold, but something more elusive: the felt distance between self and world, between matter and meaning, between the animate and the inanimate.
Each exercise is an invitation to reconfigure our relationship with what we normally consider inert. A piece of cloth or a wire is not just a piece of a thing, an object, but a living participant in the unfolding experiment. Who moves who? I feel moved as I move others. Touched as a touch. Water is not merely a substance to be observed, but a teacher; one that holds memory, shape, and story within its fluid body. We are asked to listen, not metaphorically, or to decode a series of sounds as carries of information, but as an attentively, sensorially mode of being, with the whole of ourselves; invited to listen to how material responds, resists, collaborates. Ho, if we do listen, finds ourselves surrounded by endless poetry and ever evolving songs.
Slowly, the room changes. The participants become less self-conscious, less bound. The actions become slower, more deliberate. Hands hover above surfaces without touching. A shared silence grows dense and palpable, as though the very air were thickening in response to our attention. In this shared field of potential, matter seems to stir. Our perception of them shifts, begins to reorient, as if we are glimpsing, however briefly, the vibrancy that was always there, hidden beneath the highly disciplined crust of habit.
I. Spirit and Matter: A False Divide
To speak of “alchemy” is to invoke a lineage that stretches back to the earliest attempts to understand and transform the material world. The alchemists sought not merely to manipulate substances but to reveal the spiritual forces latent within them; to recognize and engage matter not as dead, but as alive potent with potential of transformation. Their laboratories were temples as much as workshops, their experiments acts of devotion as much as science.
And yet, somewhere along the line, the world split. Spirit was banished to the realm of the private and invisible, while matter was rendered mute and dead; a storehouse of resources, an object for manipulation and extraction. Our listening numbed. Modern science, in its extraordinary self-claimed successes, hardened this divide, reducing reality to quantities and mechanisms. The world became a collection of objects rather than a communion of presences.
Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist stages a quiet rebellion against this division. It asks us not to “believe” in spirit as something separate from matter, but to feel their entanglement directly, to perceive how the two co-constitute one another. The exercises become a kind of embodied philosophy: through gesture and attention, we are reminded that to touch matter is always also to be touched by it, that to shape the world is to be shaped in return. We listen to the matter and the matter as well as the listener is changed by the listening. Changed by our presence.
Across fields of ancient alchemists, religion and modern poetry, we may speak of spiritus mundi, the spirit of the world, as the subtle force that pervades, connects, moves through, all matter. Contemporary physics, in its own language, hints at something similar: quantum fields, entanglement, the strange inseparability of observer and observed. The vocabulary changes, but the intuition remains, that the boundary between spirit and matter is more porous, more illusory, than our contemporary culture allows.
II. Reanimating the Inanimate
One of the central gestures of the training is reanimation – not in the sense of making the dead live, but of reawakening our capacity to perceive life where we have been taught to see none. A stone, when held with care, when listened to, reveals itself as more than mineral. It is a condensation of deep geological time, a fragment of planetary memory. A piece of discarded wounded matter, placed gently against the skin, becomes a messenger of forgotten memories.
This practice is not naive animism, nor is it metaphor. It is a rigorous phenomenological experiment: what happens if we suspend the inherited categories that tell us what is alive and what is not? What if we approach all matter as already vibrant, already agential, already participating in the unfolding of the world? Who are we to treat the world as otherwise?
The implications are radical. If matter is not inert, then extraction is not neutral. If the world is alive, then our habitual practices of consumption, exploitation, extraction, and disposal are revealed as acts of violence, at least as childish ignorance. The training thus becomes more than a performance; it becomes an ethical provocation. It asks: what would it mean to live in a society that recognized the agency, the spirit of water, the voice of soil, the wisdom of stone?
In this way, Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist performs a subtle but profound critique of contemporary materialism. Our culture speaks endlessly of “resources,” “commodities,” “inputs” – language that strips matter of its vitality and renders it available for manipulation. We speak of “nature” as if it were outside of us, a backdrop to human action. We speak of “the environment” as if we were not environmental beings ourselves.
In this room, those abstractions falter. My own breath mingles with that of others. Sweat from my hands darkens the cold concrete floor. Water vapor condenses on skin. The boundary between inside and outside blurs. Matter is not something “out there.” It is the substance of our own becoming. I too are matter.
III. A Different Kind of Knowledge
What is being taught here is not information but attention and participation. It is not a pedagogy of facts but of perception and becoming. The “trainings” is not designed to impart skills in the conventional sense; they are designed to sharpen sensitivity, as if we are not sensitive enough, to cultivate a different mode of knowing, or acknowledging our sensitivity – one that listens rather than categorizes, that responds rather than controls.
It is a mode of knowing that the philosopher of science Karen Barad might describe as “intra-active”. One in which entities do not pre-exist their relations but emerge through them. It is also a mode that echoes Indigenous cosmologies, in which the world is understood not as a collection of objects but as a dense web of reciprocal relationships. To know something, in this view, is not to define it but to enter into relation with it. To know is to be affected, to be touched and transformed. To continue through life altered.
The room becomes a laboratory for this relational epistemology. The experiments are humble, gestures replacing one’s body with other bodies, human and other-than-human, to allow the full arc of a breath, to search for gaps, to touch for longer and otherwise. I begin to notice subtleties that I would otherwise ignore: the weight of air on my skin, the slight resistance of gravity in each movement, the way the presence of others alters my own rhythm. I feel the power of the others over me; how I’m held, cared for, pushed.
This kind of noticing is active, participatory, creative. It requires humility, the willingness to be taught by what one encounters; and patience, the willingness to wait for the world to reveal itself on its own terms. A trust manifests. That our performative gestures may invite the spirit of the world to reach out to us, and that, what we sense, too is an invitation from the world to lean into the world. It is a practice of listening, of wondering, in the deepest sense: with the whole body, the whole self; at the edges of our understanding.
IV. Contemporary Alchemy
What, then, is a “contemporary alchemist”? The term sounds anachronistic, almost fantastical. And yet, as I move through the exercises, I begin to understand its relevance. The contemporary alchemist is not transmuting base metals into gold. Nor is she merely a scientist, analyzing the properties of matter. She is something in between, or perhaps beyond, both.
The contemporary alchemist is one who seeks to transform the relationship between humans and the material world. She is one who understands that transformation is not only a technical process but also a relational, ethical, and spiritual one. She is one who works not against matter but with it, not as master but as collaborator.
In this sense, the work is profoundly political. It challenges the underlying assumptions of industrial capitalism. Assumptions that treat matter as lifeless, nature as external, and transformation as extraction. It proposes, instead, a politics of reciprocity, of transformation, in which humans are participants in a larger alchemical process that includes rivers and rocks, microbes and machines, ancestors and futures. In a quantum field of potential we are all becoming, unfolding.
Alchemy, in this contemporary guise, becomes a metaphor for planetary practice. It is about transforming not only substances but relationships between humans and nonhumans, between self and other, between spirit and matter. It is about creating new forms of value that are not based on exploitation but on co-flourishing.
V. The Absence of Spirit in Ecological Thought
As I reflect on the experience, I am struck by a paradox. In our current ecological discourse, we speak urgently and eloquently about carbon, biodiversity, sustainability, and resilience. Yet we speak very little about spirit. The language of ecology, for all its sophistication, remains largely materialist, scientific. It struggles to account for the felt, the sacred, the more-than-material dimensions of our entanglement with the world.
Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist gestures toward another possibility; one in which spirit is not opposed to matter but understood as its most subtle expression. Spirit, in this sense, is not a supernatural force but the name we give to the relational vitality that animates all things. It is the breath that moves through the world, the pulse that connects stone and star, cell and cosmos.
To speak of spirit today is risky. It risks being dismissed as unscientific, irrational, even regressive. And yet, perhaps it is precisely this risk we need to take. That we increasingly are taking. For without a language for spirit, our ecological thinking remains incomplete. Without a sense of the sacredness and humility of matter, our actions lack depth and direction. Without a recognition of the other-than-human vitality of the world, our responses to the planetary crisis risk becoming merely technical. Efficient but lifeless. And we need your responses to be that of life.
VI. Wonderings: Toward a New Alchemy
I leave the room with more questions than answers, slowly creeping in on me during dreams and new encounters with matter. Perhaps that is the point. What would it mean to act as if spirit were not a separate realm but the immanent pulse of the world itself? What forms of economy, of politics, of art might emerge if we took seriously the idea that everything – stone and star, human and more-than-human – is animated by a shared vitality?
Perhaps contemporary alchemy is not about transforming substances at all. Perhaps it is about transforming perception and relation; about cultivating the capacity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, the sacred in the mundane. Perhaps it’s lifelong training to remain alive, even after death; to allow one’s transformations to continuously unfold beyond our conception of ‘transformation’, ‘life’, ‘death’, and ‘relation’. Perhaps it is about remembering that we, too, are matter – star-stuff that has become conscious – and that our task is not to dominate the material world but to participate joyfully in its continual poetic becoming.
As I step outside, the world looks the same – the same sky, the same streets and people. And yet, something has shifted. The air feels charged again, as it did when I first entered the room. The pavement beneath my feet seems to hum with hidden life. Even the wind on my skin feels like an invitation.
Alchemy, I realize, is not confined to the laboratory, the temple, or the studio. It is everywhere, always already happening, if only we have the patience, and the courage, to listen and wonder.
Epilogue: Listening as Transformation
The deepest lesson of Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist is that transformation does not begin with action. It begins with an invitation to offer my attention. It begins with listening. Listening to the subtle signals of the material world, to the murmurs of our own bodies, to the whispers of a planet that is very much alive.
To listen in this way is to become an apprentice again; to relinquish mastery, certainty, control. It is to place oneself in the flow of a larger process, of energy and life, one that is older and wiser than any human project. To remember that even the incomprehensible large amount of information we have accumulated is infinitely small in relation to what is available.
It is to participate, humbly and joyfully, in the great alchemical dance of matter and spirit.
By Lukas Quist Lund
Lukas Quist Lund (b. 1997, DK, he/they/it, based in Copenhagen) is an educated philosopher, art historian, teacher, organizer, editor & writer, curator, and cultural worker.
Lukas work with transdisciplinary artistic and research practices, often centered on fostering para-institutional initiatives, including TRAVERS (2021), Bureau for Listening (2021–), The Listening Biennial (2023–), Center for Not-Knowing (2024–), and The Resting Labs (2024–) – as collaborative platforms for shared inquiry, artistic expression, and collective practice.