This performance was intended to collectively examine the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, potentiality and actuality. Calling each individual event a “consideration,” I conducted the fourth iteration of this engagement series while completing an artist residency program in Reykjavik, Iceland. My role was that of the “transmuter”; my fellow residents, defined as “seekers,” were asked to quiet the mind and locate a secret within. I invited seekers to choose one of twenty-two “options”—igneous pieces of basalt formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava. This material is composed of rhyolite and because it is highly viscous, favors explosive eruptions over effusive ones; it sprouted from Gaia herself as the goddess Athena was born from the forehead of Zeus. It will outlast you—but what else did you expect from the center of mother earth?

Seekers placed their option on a chosen part of the body while internally considering its physical properties of color, texture, weight, composition, place of origin, and current state of existence. They listened to it, smelled it, tasted it.

Tectonic plates spread at a rate of 2.5 centimeters per year below us. As the transmuter, I read a previously prepared long-form text to aid seekers in isolating their most omnipresent desire. In the context of the many definitions of the term “settle” and through articulated breathing, seekers visualized their desires outside of the body as planetary wonders to play with and admire, rotating at supersonic speeds to gradual implosion until forming the most perfect sphere in the known universe.