Mythical matter – invisible, or maybe glowing in the dark, with the power to heal or to kill, hard as stone and soft as silk, growing forever or magically dissolving when daylight fades. The Golden Fleece, Sandman’s Sand, Dragonglass, the biblical Manna or Redstone from the Minecraft world – the stories we tell are full of promising materials, mythical matter with magical properties.
Guided by guest lecturers Johanna Pichlbauer and Isabel Prade, students of Kunstuniversität Linz took a semester to work on their own legends, exploring the narrative potential of material. In an ironic twist, a type of matter that is as invisible to us as it is dangerous thwarted the workshop plans – but legends can also be spun at home. And so student kitchens turned into fantastic alchemy stations and transformed the inconspicuous into the mystical.The Imaginarium, a printed booklet, shows the results of the experiments, matter from distant futures, myths and fairytales.
