Aluminati: Rekindling a Forgotten Future of Foundry
Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future, November 2022.
by Emily Budd
Aluminati originated out of a desire to find a queer and inclusive contemporary Foundry. The ancient alchemy of metal casting sparks much inspiration among its participants, and the foundry is a site where community is essential. Foundry artists employ a multi-matter process to create a material transformation, melting metal and pouring it into crafted refractory molds to take a new form. We collaborate to set up the workshop and operate the yoke that carries the crucible. Glowing a volcanic hot-orange, the crucible emerges from the furnace with its molten metal ready to forge something new. The contemporary practice of foundry craft embodies endless potential for transformative and collaborative art-world applications at the core of its techniques. As a queer artist, these themes of transformation and community inspire me to practice foundry craft in the expanded field.
November 2022: Pouring melted recycled aluminum from a crucible into a community-made mold during the public foundry performance for Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future.
Despite these flamboyant and promising facets, popular foundry culture is rife with individual competitiveness so deeply ingrained that experimentation is often discouraged or mocked. The heavy prevalence of toxic masculinity, privilege and ableism suppresses diversity and equity in advanced foundry craft and metal fabrication practices, and points to the dark side of foundry arts: its compliance in making the power-flaunting war monuments and place-claiming statues of white-supremicism and colonization; at best a lack of representation, at worst glorifying racist figures or misrepresenting US history. As reformative monuments became an approach in my personal artistic practice to awaken a lost queer ancestry, I was thinking of ways to use the foundry to activate needed change in its own field.
Aluminati is a diverse and experimental foundry project that expands on the transformative and collaborative potential of hot metal casting techniques. Our sustainable material-sourcing of local recycled aluminum inspires the name, along with the alchemical transformations we create through fiery material processes at organized community gatherings. An evolving group of Sculpture students, artists, and members of the community create solid metal monuments that embody change and define new futures.
July 2022: Aluminati members work together to melt scrap metal in the furnace. The scrap liquifies into a molten metal to pour into molds.
Aluminati challenges toxic masculinity and white-supremicist gatekeeping prevalent in foundry culture by encouraging women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ folks to embrace the powerfully transformative processes of making art with molten metal. Presently, very few folks have the privilege to benefit from the direct use of these facilities through the making of monuments. Aluminati creates a space to use the documentative qualities of metal casting to remember a community with activist intentions and goals for the future, to memorialize a group of folks forming a gathering for change. Several years of experiments with mark-making and documentation began to reveal a possible future of foundry craft. By growing new practices and approaches in the foundry, we can empower folks to remember their histories that have been erased while laying claim to their future. Aluminati is led by a collective voice with many different experiences, memories, desires, and futures to memorialize.
November 2022: Members of the community gather with Aluminati members during the workshop for Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future.
Aluminati provides a space where people of color and queer folks can use these powerful facilities to make what we want: a community monument that documents our coming together in the foundry. Instead of focusing on making a series of individual artworks, we harness the power of durable documentation that lasts long into the future to create a collaborative piece. By practicing within this gap of representation we fortify our own definitions of a liquid, changeable, and hopeful future. Aluminati performs a hopeful version of a multifaceted foundry practice: it is diverse, inclusive, experimental, and centers community over competition through collaboration in the foundry.
“If there ever was a time for fire in the belly and a radical politics of hope, it is now,” wrote Mike Davis in 2016. We are all drawn to fire. If there is a foundry pour event, folks naturally flock to see this bright process of fire interacting with the elements. Our early events were a series of experiments with public integration. We perfected a method of collecting hands-on markings from the audience in malleable sand molds. This gave them a role in the making of the sculptural object. The results that were immortalized in solid metal revealed layers of impressions made through many touches, memorializing the gathering of a community in shining, recycled aluminum. In the language of monuments, it was a gestural version of our claim: “On this day, a community gathered to change the future.”
November 2022: Pouring melted recycled aluminum from the crucible into our flaming heart mold during the public foundry project for Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future.
Along with the ancient arts of foundry craft, we also practice a reformed revival of the ancient art of molybdomancy, or divination via molten metal. We encourage self-interpretation over fortune-telling, to claim one’s future through intention-setting and activation. We offer a series of questions that prompt self-reflection towards the actions necessary to obtain one’s hopes for the future. Visiting participants each melt a dollop of tin in an iron ladle and cast it into water, quenching the movement that instantly hardens into a dynamic silhouette. Casting its shadow reveals a message to interpret for the future.
For Aluminati x Mendieta in July 2022, we collaborated with the work of Ana Mendieta through a workshop with the Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada. They were showing Mendieta’s Gunpowder Silueta and Rupestrian Sculptures videos as part of the Still Motion exhibition. Centering her continued presence through documented performance and the importance of her voice, Aluminati discussed how her work laid a path for us in the present, that we would carry into the future.
We created a large reservoir full of oiled sand and placed it on the foundry floor, a piece of temporary earth. We designed a form inspired by the goddesses Mendieta carved into sandstone cave walls, ours carved into a sand mold. Our version has arms, agency, things to do. One arm pulls from the past, while the other reaches toward the future. We invited museum guests to reach, touch, place, grasp, indent, mark, and leave a record of their input in the sand. The final sculpture successfully memorialized the gathering of folks who joined together in honor of Mendieta’s works, like our paths crossing in time.
July 2022: Members of the community gather with Aluminati members during the workshop for Aluminati x Mendieta.
Markings detail
July 2022: Pouring the mold for Aluminati x Mendieta
Left: Final sculpture for Aluminati x Mendieta in the collections of the Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas.
Right: The burning metal hardens into the shape we prepared, inspired by the work of Ana Mendieta.
For our most recent project in November 2022, Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future provided a public space where curious and hopeful folks could join us in practicing our themes of self-reflection, changing the future, and creating a monument to community love. Our sand mold was prepped to gather the impressions of the community once again, this time featuring a large heart in place of the pour basin, its channels flowing to represent an expansion of our hearts’ desires. The form loosely referenced a more violent history of foundry craft, especially the popular imagery of molten metal filling a mold full of blades in preparation for warfare. Here we reclaim these tropes, replacing them with the ultimate goal of whole and fulfilling love.
Traveling from the Barrick Museum, our theme of Community Love was visited by the hengfu banner by artist Luke Lukeon Cheng that states, “Do You Believe in Love Between Comrades?” Local artists brandished the banner before making their marks in our community mold.
November 2022: the traveling hengfu banner by Luke Lukeon Cheng with Aluminati members and members of the community at Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future.
We provided a series of prompt questions such as “What do you love about the future?” and “what do you love about your future self?” Written responses to these questions were collected and added into our “Crucible of the Future” with the melting scrap aluminum. As these intentions dissolved into our metal, the illuminated embers of the paper created a sparking of intentions rising into the universe. The community cheered as our hopes and dreams transformed into a molten recipe that we poured into our mold. A flaming heart burned and flowed, its flames lingering like the longing we have for reclaiming foundry craft.
November 2022: The written intentions spark from the furnace at Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future.
The making of monuments facilitated by Aluminati events feature the evidence of community gatherings captured in durable metal and hardened for eternity, carrying our message into the future. As a queer artist I see the foundry as a site of deconstruction and reconstruction, an idea that I deepen through a practice of seeking the hidden possibilities within that which is discarded from contemporary foundry practice. As foundries close and become outdated or subject to program cuts with increasing occurrence throughout the US, I wonder if this is partially because the craft hasn't widely opened up to a diversified practice. My hope is that Aluminati can light a spark of hope in our community for a redefined renewal, an emergence of inclusive and expanded foundry practice in the realm of contemporary art. But more importantly, this expansion can be a tool for reconnecting folks to their lost pasts and futures, to empower history and represent hopeful futures of an inclusive and equitable social community.
Aluminati x Mendieta Artists
Emily Budd
Tiffany Lin
Iulia Filipov-Serediuc
Christina Uran
Micah Haji-Sheikh
Ariana Martinez
Jazmon Neal
Jacob Williams
McKenzie Easter
Breanna Hansen
Karl Pittman
Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future Artists
Emily Budd
Iulia Filipov-Serediuc
Christina Uran
Micah Haji-Sheikh
Ariana Martinez
Jazmon Neal
Jacob Williams
McKenzie Easter
Breanna Hansen
Sarah Barber
Marina Wong
Sitka Coppedge
Karl Pittman
Nishan Ganimian
Notes:
Photos by Shahab Zargari, Emily Budd, Aluminati, and UNLV Photo Services.
Aluminati x Mendieta was performed in the Sculpture studio foundry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) in July 2022, in collaboration with the Barrick Museum of Art, funded by the Art Bridges Foundation. Aluminati: Love Letters to the Future followed in November 2022, which was funded by the UNLV College of Fine Arts in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Emily Budd is a contemporary artist, craftsperson and writer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at UNLV where she founded the expanding foundry project, Aluminati.
Sources
https://linktr.ee/aluminati_lv
https://lukeluokuncheng.com/Hengfu-banners
https://www.unlv.edu/event/still-motion
https://www.nevadahumanities.org/blog/2020/9/9/queer-cities-and-their-temporary-monuments
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