In 17th-century Europe it was regarded as an established fact that all swans were white. No European had ever seen a swan of any other color, and therefore it was assumed that blue, red or black swans did not exist. Yet, people still had the ability to imagine the existence of such a bird. The Roman poet Juvenal, writing in the 2nd century, was the first to invoke black swans—“a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan”1—as a metaphor for “the nonexistent” or “impossible”. This idea endured in European thought for many centuries. Thus, when Dutch explorers in 1697 were the first Europeans to observe a black swan (Cygnus Atratus) on the west coast of Australia, it must have felt like a true miracle.
In my opinion, there is ultimately something queer about alchemy. It is about acknowledging that everything can transform into something else, all is in a constant state of flux. It is constantly exploring, and not settling with what we think we know. It is about finding out what is hidden in the gray zones, and refrain from following the most logical or straight path towards knowledge.
Victoria Nelson writes about how transformation is not only happening with the materials, it is also taking place within the alchemist;
In the divinity of chemicals (...), we see the origins of the Hellenistic science of alchemy, in which radical divinizing changes could be made to happen in the soul of the alchemist simultaneously with his or her objects of experimentation.9
Therefore, alchemy is a deeply personal and spiritual way of aiming to transcend our everyday lives. Traditionally the alchemist works in solitude and secrecy. When I invite an audience to experience my experiments, it becomes a ritual. Together we spend some time with the materials transforming, while also allowing a kind of transformation to happen to us as a group.
It is a foundational human trait to long for miracles. We yearn for the unexpected, something new to transcend our everyday life. As anyone who has planted a seed might know, the world is already brimming with wonders. Why, then, is this not enough? Why does it sometimes feel like we have lost the connection to something larger than ourselves, something supernatural or more-than-human?
My works often take the form of poetic rituals where I combine elements from religion, mythology, history and science. Through my performance art practice I seek to explore our relation to our environments and the materiality of the world, questioning the narratives and conventions that shape our reality. In my performance, “The Weeping Madonna”, I explore the role of an alchemist, as someone in constant search for new knowledge, potentiality and transformation. The alchemist works in the intersection between science and magic, and much like an artist, they open up a space where potential realities can emerge. This space has the potential to work like a test station for utopias, and offers a fresh perspective on the world.
I am interested in working with performance art because of its capacity to create a direct encounter with the audience. The performance depends on their presence, both as participants and co-creators in the immediacy of the here-and-now. Together the performer and the audience can dive into the unknown, and enter an enhanced reality saturated with potential and uncertainty, with its own poetry and logic.
A starting point for my performance The Weeping Madonna, is my fascination with statues performing miracles, such as depictions of Virgin Mary that spontaneously start crying droplets of blood or scented oils. A simulacrum is a material image or representation of deities. Through the ages there are countless examples of these hierophanies, which are tangible manifestations of the divine. In his book Simulacra and Simulation2, Jean Baudrillard describes the simulacrum as a representation of something that has no original, and as something other than a copy of the real, it has become hyper-real.
Weeping sculptures are often associated with Catholicism, but the phenomena of statues taking on human functions and performing miracles long predates Christianity. In the Hellenistic period (323 BC - 30 BC) there are reported incidents of animated idols such as statues walking around, singing or prophesying. These kinds of miraculous statues are also known from religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
In this text I am exploring the human need for miracles through a queer lens. Are there moments where change seems more possible, that potentiality is within reach? How can moments like these be called forth through, for instance, a performance with a live audience? Can we use our imagination as a starting point for collective rituals, and manifest a new reality, a futurity?
Possibilities exist, or more nearly, they exist within a logical real, the possible, which is within the present and is linked to presence. Potentialities are different in that although they are present, they do not exist in present things. Thus, potentialities have a temporality that is not in the present but, more nearly, in the horizon, which we can understand as futurity.10
In our time of environmental crisis and political unrest, a very powerful narrative we repeat in the Western world is that positive change is impossible. It is too late, capitalism is the only power that can shape our future, and anyone saying otherwise is a naive dreamer. Hartmut Rosa writes about alienation, which he describes as – a deep, structural distortion of the relations between the self and the world and the various ways a subject is placed or ‘localized’ in the world–11. If we don’t feel connected to the world around us, it is no wonder that we easily fall into passivity. How can we prevent becoming paralyzed by hopelessness, and stay open to the idea that things could change for the better?
In history there are numerous examples of political and cultural change happening after processes where people come together, unite their voices, and fight for what they believe is a better future. The Stonewall riots in 1969, for example, marked a new beginning for the gay rights movement in the USA and other countries, something that eventually led to more recognition and rights for queer people. Same sex-marriage or gender affirming care would not have existed today if nobody first had dreamt about such things, and then taken action to call them into existence. In riots and in live performances alike, we can experience the transformative power of the collective. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz invites the reader to imagine a radical and potential future. We cannot foresee what the future will look like, but we do have the possibility to imagine it as something other than a hyper capitalist dystopia. I believe one way of exploring this potentiality is through art.
We are wired to exist in relation to things, whether it’s nature, something more-than-human, or other humans. If these connections are broken, we lose our sense of meaning. Hartmut Rosa uses the term “resonance” to describe – a kind of relationship to the world, formed through affect and emotion, intrinsic interest, and perceived self-efficacy, in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed–12. Through active, mutual encounters between the self and the world, we can escape a strictly instrumental way of seeing our surroundings, and create meaningful relationships to something other.
In my performance The Weeping Madonna, one goal was to open up a space where reality seems more flexible than normally, and give the audience a feeling that more is possible than we tend to think. I wanted the performance to work as a poetic, collective ritual, where the different elements were allowed to remain undefined, and stay in an ever changing and fleeting state. We, as humans, cannot possibly grasp the complexity in all the things and lifeforms we coexist with. I think it is very important to cultivate the ability to be open to all the things we do not know or understand, and to meet the world with curiosity and open senses, and not just settle with what we think we know. It is an alchemical quest of tuning in to the world, meeting it with a sense of wonder, and searching for the miraculous that may be hidden in between the binaries. All it takes to change our outlook on the world is one black swan.
The anecdote of the black swan serves as a reminder that our established truths and thought systems are frail and more changeable than we assume. They can be challenged and disproven at any point. It is a reminder that we don’t know everything and can’t foresee what we don’t know. In his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable8, Taleb Nassim presented black swan theory, where he defines a black swan as a single event or observation that comes as a surprise with disproportionate consequences, and as something that radically changes our outlook about something. For the alchemist, this attitude towards the world is key, to remain open for the undiscovered wonders in all things.
Alchemy is a forerunner of chemistry, and is a combination of mysticism, philosophical thinking, and chemical knowledge with roots in Alexandria in Egypt 300 BC. Well known experiments by the alchemists are the quests to create gold, or life prolonging elixirs. I am drawn towards the role of the alchemist as an individual with a profound curiosity for the world and its components, and a deep longing for an understanding of both material and spiritual processes. The alchemist has a suspicion that there are a lot of things unknown, and that the world is still full of mysteries. The alchemist is a miracle worker who through their exploration wants to discover the next black swan.
When I am performing, my body activates the materials in different ways, and lets them perform, in search of some kind of poetry-as-ritual. Sometimes my body is just as much a material as the others, and the line between my body and the objects or the environment gets blurred. An example of an alchemical action I make during the performance, entails the usage of a glass jar, water and light. I send the light from a small torch through the water in the glass jar. The refraction from this results in an abstract light phenomenon, projected on the white plaster sculptures and their surroundings, as well as my own body. Because of the movement in the water the light refuses to settle for a form, it delves in a shapeless, liquid state. These poetic gestures may imply that the materials transform, come alive. These mundane, everyday components are not hidden for the audience, but still result in something captivating and “magical” happening.
My performance The Weeping Madonna was shown three times in Reykjavík, January 2025. A black box is turned into an alchemy lab, and when the audience enters, the alchemist (performed by me) is seated by a large desk. He is already working, writing notes in a book. The desk is filled with objects such as a funnel, a jar filled with gel, and glass bottles of different sizes. Also located on stage are three white plaster sculptures with rounded, body-like shapes. One is hanging from the ceiling, one is standing on a stool, one is lying on the ground.
The Weeping Madonna functions as a ceremony, where the alchemist is performing different material experiments, readings and rituals with the aim to create contact with something more-than-human. The sculptures are there to provide bodies for spiritual entities, which would be drawn down to the material realm. Some of the rituals in the performance are depending on participation from the audience, such as a voice meditation, and a segment where members of the audience are asked to come on stage and place an object on a mirror.
The first simulacrum activated in the performance is the Weeping Madonna, the plaster sculpture with the most human-like shape. The alchemist breathes into an opening on top of her “head”, before pouring water into it with the help of a funnel. From an invisible opening on the front of her head, water starts seeping and dripping out. This is a much used technique to make crying sculptures, plaster statues with hollowed, glazed heads with invisible openings for the liquid to seep out. In The Weeping Madonna this mechanism is exposed to the audience, as we can see the alchemist being the one pouring water into the sculpture. However, this miracle still works on a level, as a weird and poetic manifestation of something “other”.
Victoria Nelson writes in her book The Secret Life of Puppets3 about a first-century bust of the philosopher Epicurus with “a hollowed-out center culminating in a discreet hole in the great philosopher’s mouth” – made for a tube that a priest hidden behind a wall could speak into, in order for the bust to work as an oracle. The people witnessing it might have been aware about the words not really coming from the head itself, but Nelson explains further that this awareness does not interfere with the religious experience;
To its practitioners, however, ventriloquism of the kind demanded by the bust of Epicurus would not have been a ruse at all, but rather a tool by which the priest possessed by the god could give utterance to the god’s words through the statue.
Similarly, in live performances, we can, through a willing suspension of disbelief4, immerse ourselves in the presented fictions, and experience them as truth. Even though we know they are fictions, we react with real feelings and make new realizations. Through art we can show the truth by telling a beautiful lie5.
- Juvenal, The Satires. 130
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Later prt. edition. Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
- Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard University Press, 2003.
- "Suspension of Disbelief.” In Wikipedia, March 23, 2025.
- Martel, Phil Ford and J. F. “Art Is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles’s ‘F for Fake.’” Weird Studies. Accessed April 9, 2025.
- Munoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 34695th edition. New York London: NYU Press, 2009.
- Krans, Kim. The Wild Unknown Alchemy Deck and Guidebook. Chronicle Prism, 2022.
- Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Annotated edition. New York: Random House, 2007.
- Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Munoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 34695th edition. New York London: NYU Press, 2009.
- Wolffhechel, Michael. “Hartmut Rosa - Alienation and Acceleration.” Skeleton-Man, February 18, 2022.
- Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. 1st edition. Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.
Henrik Koppen, Reykjavik Iceland 2025
Thank you to Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings and Berit Miriam Glanz for the help with writing this essay
Thank you to Brogan Davison, Hrefna Lind Lárusdóttir, Rósa Ómarsdóttir, Martina Priehodová, Egill Ingibergsson, Simon Schulz and Emil Gunnarsson for help and support during the production and showing of The Weeping Madonna
All photos except the header image taken by Owen Fiene
I have sometimes wondered about how my experiences as a queer person have shaped my worldview, and my way of working creatively. As a child growing up in a rural context, I discovered that there were strict norms and expectations about how a boy should act, dress and talk. I also found out I would have a hard time conforming to those structures deemed by society as natural, and acceptable, as a child with a strong creative drive, and a flair for flamboyancy. For a long time, I subscribed to the idea that straightness was the only path to a good life, and hid this part of my identity. Deep down I knew something was not right, and a simmering dissonance grew forth. I realized the map did not match the terrain.
It is a part of many queer people’s stories to figure out that the world is not made for you. You realize that you have to create a new world for yourself. In his book Cruising Utopia6, José Esteban Munoz writes about queerness as something that is not yet here, but on the horizon. As a closeted teenager, using my imagination became a survival mechanism, and I dreamt about a reality where I could be open about my identity, and dare to love. Aren’t these the first step towards a queer utopia? Dreaming about it, and imagining a different, possible world?
This moment of realization was life-changing for me. If so many of the narratives instilled in me by a heteronormative society were false, what other made up narratives shape our reality? Who invented these oppressive structures, and for what reason? For me, this general skepticism constituted a queer worldview, which I find to be an immensely useful tool both for me as an artist, and in my daily life.
Western culture today is dominated by episteme, intellectually certain knowledge. We are driven by a strong need to define, categorize and create binaries to make sense of the world. Especially in times of uncertainty and chaos, we have a need to simplify and create fictions. When someone challenges the truths upheld by the heteronormative majority, people can react by getting uncomfortable, scared and angry. That makes it hard to take into consideration that these structures can be straight up harmful for those who don’t have the option to fit into them.
Queerness is to dare to linger in the un-defined, shapeless and uncertain. It is to accept how liquid and chaotic the world is and to find freedom in that. It is to never stop asking questions, and always be skeptical of the truths that are presented as absolutes. It is to reject binary thinking, and to zoom into the gray zones to explore what is hidden there. It is to take a step back, and see society from an outside perspective. It is to be the one to say “it’s actually not that simple”. It is to use your imagination to create a world for yourself when you realize the world is not designed with you in mind. It is to say, over and over again; “there must be something more”.
