NOW AND UPCOMING
h!e artistic quest 2024-2028
recipes and cooking
classes for the
contemporary alchemist
h!e's artistic quest throughout 2024-2028 is A playing field of
re-schooling and un-schooling. Aligning our spirit and our
earthly existence into actions of care and repair.
Practicing our entanglement, intra-connectedness and responsibility as co-habitants of the
finite system earth.
Illustration by Christopher De Lorenzo
The Alchemist Quest
is a multi-year lived artistic project exploring contemporary alchemy as both metaphor and practice: a field for investigating how spirit and matter, body and environment, imagination and material reality may be understood and experienced as deeply intra-connected. At a time of social fragmentation, ecological exhaustion and spiritual numbness the quest asks a simple question:
How can we become nourishing to
the worlds we are entangled in?
The Alchemist Quest draws inspiration from historical alchemical traditions in which transformations of matter and transformations of consciousness were inseparable, and the visible and invisible worlds were understood as constituting each other.
Alchemy invites speculation, mystery and that which escapes explanation to shape processes of knowing, creation and transformation. In our contemporary search, this alchemical understanding encounters, among others, the work of feminist thinker and quantum physicist Karen Barad. Their notion of intra-action proposes that beings and matter do not exist as separated entities, but emerge through and within their relations -are their relations.
The quest proposes that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of perception, relational capacity and imagination: a consequence of centuries of separation between mind and matter, human and nature, spirit and science.
Through a curious, playful and lived artistic practice, The Alchemist Quest explores how these divisions might be healed and re-connected; re-imagined, re-sensed and transformed.
It unfolds as an trans-local ecosystem of practices, relations and situated experiments creating transformative openings. Artists, researchers, participants, materials, landscapes, technologies and more-than-human actors become collaborators in a collective manifestation. Reaching from alchemist practices seeded in everyday life and DIT formats to participatory artworks in and choreographies presented in art spaces and museums.
It’s our hope that our alchemist quest will nourish bodies, imaginations and our relationships towards a paradigm shift of deeper sensing and enacting of our connected relations – imagine a world shaped by contemporary alchemists?
Read "A Reflective Field Report and Philosophical Essay" by Lukas Lund
Reflections on the h!e work "Trainings for the Contemporary Alchemist -a series of smaller and larger explosions" performed in Holstebro DK, June 2025
A selection of current and future unfoldings and manifistations of the contemporary alchemist quest
2027-28
"A year from Wednesday -time is round as the earth”
A transformative journey over the course of one year, with 12 performative interventions into daily life dedicated to earth logic.
/ Premiere March 2027
2026
“Tiny Cracks and Grand openings” process sharing.
Participatory performance and a collective inquiry of expanding and becoming everything.
/ Process sharing at Metropolis Landscape, Copenhagen and Hibernation Residency, Refshæle Annex, Copenhagen. Co-creating artists: Daniel Norback, Emil Bøll, Vera Maeder, Jacob Langaa Sennek.
2026-28
“Recipies for the contemporary alchemist”
-a collective alchemist cook book in the making.
Camp 2: sharing 8 days of alchemist cooking at spring mountain in Småland. Developing Collaborative open source methodology for Alchemist Cooking, thereafter swarming out for locally situated manifestations and practices.
-Cristina Maldonado in Prague and Lisbon in collaboration with play lab.
https://www.instagram.com/trustcollectivept/
https://www.instagram.com/play.research.lab/
-Jukka Ristolainen at Kokko residency and in Finland /Kangasniemi.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYol5E4un6o/
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DaH2LAguRuC/
-Mirja Timm at Ljurhallafabriken in Gothenborg, Sweden.
https://ljurhallafabriken.samarbetet.org/activities/Ajj7KmrHByoRtkgRM
https://www.instagram.com/fine_davis/p/DZFlquoAB-K/?img_index=2
-Lukas Lund, Bureau for Listening CPH / online.
https://bureauforlistening.com/listening-as-alchemy/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DXjauIMiDyz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Becoming wood time and other explorations.
Artistic research in the framework of Sockenskog https://www.sockenskogen.se// Skuggskogar research project, Lamhult, Småland Sweden / SLU Uppsala University.
2025
“Trainings for the contemporary alchemist- a series of smaller and larger explosions”
A participatory performance merging art, science and speculation. An embodied philosophical and playful practice of care, repair and presence, making room for new, adventurous ways of understanding our entanglement in the world we inhabit.
/ Co-creating artists: Daniel Norback, Emil Bøll, Vera Maeder, Jacob Langaa Sennek.
Performed in Holstebro and co-produced by Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. Process sharing in Copenhagen, Metropolis Landscapes.
Resonance of “Trainings for the contemporary alchemist, a series of smaller and larger explosions”
A Reflective Field Report and Philosophical Essay by Lukas Lund, on artwork by hello!earth performed in Holstebro June 2025
“Expand and become everything”
Workshop at earth logic exhibit, Linneaus Cultural University Växjö , Sweden.
Hibernation residency, Refshale Annex Copenhagen
Readings and writings on quantum body, spirit beyond religion, resonance and intra-connection. Developing Scores.
Residency in Holstebro at Nordic Teaterlaboratorium.
How to make intra-connection tangible? Research on water, its capacity of holding memory, and being affected by what it is exposed to mentally and emotionally, among other.
/ Co-creating artists: Daniel Norback, Emil Bøll, Vera Maeder, Jacob Langaa Sennek.
2024
Camp 1 at Spring Mountain (Källeberg) in Småland.
Joint explorations into research questions and framework for the Alchemist quest.
/ Contributors: Eero Tapio Vuori, (FI/ director, performance and ritual artist), Fin Jordeau ( UK/ PT, microbiologist, activist), Maria Richter Simsek (SE, creative process facilitation, design), Vera Maeder (DK/ SE, choreography/ performance), Jacob Langaa Sennek (DK scenography and visual design).
Somatic Lab:
Explorations on thick relations, and connecting to matter from within bodily experience.
/ Design+Change, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden.
2023
Research laboratories / stone day
Workshop on becoming matter and stone connection.
/ +change day, Linneaus University
Workshops at climate emergency lab
Somatic explorations on touching materials from within.
/ MA design +change Linneaus University, Växjö.
Diverse research activities
such as conversations on approaches to health and poisons with homeopaths, learning about the capacity of bee’s and cat purr’s frequency for balancing systems, meeting people that were digging into the depth of the compost's life and water’s memory.