Substance of Power is Gosia Lehmann and Valerian Blos’s ongoing artistic research, examining the relationship between chemical substances and different forms of domination. The starting point of the work is the story of the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang who swallowed an elixir of quicksilver (mercury) given to him by his court alchemists and physicians in a bid to become immortal. However, instead of achieving eternal life, it is said that the emperor fell into paranoid-depressive states caused by mercury poisoning, leading to disastrously bad decisions that influenced the fate of the entire empire.

In contemporary times,  intoxication via ‘substances of power’ has become more ubiquitous, and to some extent, been democratized. While pollution and waste disposal contributes to widespread injustice—impacting especially vulnerable social groups—new types of poisons such as microplastics flow more or less equally through everyone’s veins. Although workers in some industries suffer from increased exposure to such toxicants due to their jobs, research suggests that all human and non-human organisms are dealing with the effects of microplastics on their systems, regardless of their privilege and status. Given the fact that there are no threshold values in which these microchemicals are actually safe, the ingested substances pose questions and may serve to re-evaluate how to understand power and the way it works in the world.

Each evening of the Discarding programme, the artists extend an invitation to taste the bitter truth behind late-stage technological consumerism and capitalist consumption cycles. The performative offerings explore a different contemporary ‘substance of power’ each evening, and invite participants to contemplate—and  directly experience—how they end up in our own ‘fleshy hardware,’ namely our bodies.