Jessica Segall: Reverse Alchemy on the Gold Coast

About

In December 2020, water joined oil, gold, and other futures commodities traded on Wall Street allowing buyers and sellers to barter a fixed price for the delivery of a fixed quantity of water at a future date. Jessica Segall’s new immersive installation underscores the reality that life-sustaining natural resources will become scarce across the globe, as humans both drive, and are impacted by, climate change, droughts, population growth, development and pollution. Here in South Florida, home to one of the most productive purifying aquifer systems in the world, the work weighs the value of gold and extractive capitalism against clean water and fertile soil. 

"Reverse Alchemy'' is a scientific process by which refined gold from the US mint is dissolved and restructured into new geological formations through chemical and mechanical processes. Segall’s research into Reverse Alchemy began in 2019 in collaboration with metallurgist York Smith at the Mining Department at the University of Utah. Segall and the University produced a set of experimental stones, and grew potatoes in diluted gold-water. Reverse Alchemy on the Gold Coast stems from the artist’s research trip with Hawapi to the Conga Gold Mine with the activist Maxima Acuna, who has won several legal battles to retain her farmland and prevent a new, multinational gold mine from developing in the Andes. 

The installation features video projections filmed during Segall’s reverse engineering process, in which gold from Imperial mints dissolves in an Aqua Regia solution. The resulting gold solution shown in these videos is diluted into the water which irrigates the plants over the course of the exhibition. The selected plants, including Brassicajuncea or Indian Mustard, horsetail, and purple hyacinth bean, have all been utilized in studies and experimentations by scientists worldwide, exploring the idea of the future of gold mining through cultivation rather than extraction. Findings from hydroponic studies inducing hyperaccumulation of gold by Christopher Anderson, Professor in Environmental Science at Massey University, New Zealand, have found that it would be technically feasible to grow “a crop of gold”; and studies by Ramiro Ramírez Pisco, Juan Pablo Gómez Yarce, Juan José Guáqueta Restrepo and Daniel Gaviria Palacio at Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín likewise found that rhizomes like horsetail have significant potential for gold phytoextraction. 

In addition to the lush gold-fed garden, a series of experimental stones is presented within the installation, cast from Florida Sand, 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.