Everything that contains calcium today flourished in the Jurassic period. Thus, marble and gypsum were once vital and fully expanded lifeforms which ultimately perished, becoming compacted and compressed. There is an enormous quantity of deaths these rocks have absorbed in the millennia of their formation. Between these two well known and vastly used minerals lies the path of diagonal autopsy performed within the frame of what we call Cosy Cosmos Cosmetics. How do minerals like gypsum and marble relate to the evolution of large-scale structures in nature? How can we trace and depict biography of these sedimentary rocks? How can we narrate these raw geological materials, both before and after they were infected by human interaction?
The word cosmetics (which we all know as a noun denoting the art of beautifying the body) derives from the Greek kosmos, meaning amongst others “order”, “arrangement”, “ornament”, or “adornment”. The search for order and beauty in the molecular cosmos of calcium compounds intersects with the physicality and material properties of marble, plaster, lime, cement, and other calcite formations. Our cosy cosmos is a romance based on material ontology and material consciousness that underline the poetic, creative moment of these minerals, their ability to transform both themselves and us as well.
The cosy calcium cosmos romance is an approved entanglement of scientific knowledge with aesthetic deviances. Science explains that calcium is a metal (actually it is the most abundant and vital metal in animals, including humans). It also demonstrates that calcium is leaves, bones, teeth, shells, kidney stones, rocks, soil… Calcium is a vital organ of the Earth crust. It is the core matter of raw materials. It is ubiquitous and in constant cycle. It is the telluric pulse, a vehicle of life, it is dead and alive, dissolved and coagulated. Science also tells us that calcium is a primordial nuclide that exists between us and other galaxies. It is an interstellar substance, one of the main rock-forming elements that had been present in the cosmos long before our solar system was formed.
Calcium is steel and concrete, architecture and agriculture; it is a disease and it is the cure, it is poison and the antidote. Calcium is a fossil of eternal warfare, a trace of existence, it is the last and lost transmission. Our instinct guides us to feel calcium as a hidden element of energy and a dormant deposit of growth, a lead under the surface and over the edge, the state of crystalized past and future, order and chaos, beauty and cosmetics. Our lust for calcium feeds our libido of lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere exploitation. Calcium is love, politics, economy, and ecology. Then we see calcium hacked by lime, plaster, pigments, marble and transmuted into art. Sometimes it is digested into a soft matter that remembers shapes (plaster, cement), or it is petrified into brittle condensation which withstands contouring (marble, limestone, alabaster…). Often it disintegrates into exaggerated extensions (pigments, stabilizers, fertilizers, preservatives, coagulants, supplements).
Calcium feels either like an indifferent matter or like a promising zygote. It tests out the logic of existence ethics in which the living – non-living or human – non-human binaries might no longer apply. It can be an absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute syntax, absolute cosmos, inorganic and organic, stone and flesh, blood and water. It oscillates between ancient geology and new technology. Calcium seems out of time, out of place, out of this world, out of shape, out of shell, out of mind.
Alexandra Tamásová ●
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