Abstract
In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), space travel, artificial intelligence,
digitised communication, as well as mass-scale scientific, biochemical and nuclear
engineering are lucrative industries for investment, and colonial expansion. Indigenous
knowledge systems and spiritual practices are undermined in the name of scientific
progress. This is a modern-day re-enactment of a historical pattern of colonial erasure of
multiple knowledge systems in favour of the ‘scientific rationality’ of the European
Enlightenment, under the guise of ‘advancing technology’. The self-serving and destructive,
neo-colonial agendas of contemporary technological expansion, conquest, exploitation
and surveillance for capital gain, has led to the degradation of native societies,
destruction of the environment, and the continued oppression of those deemed
subaltern.
Contemporary feminist artists, like the alchemists and shamans of the ancient world, are
finding ways to counter the neo-colonial narrative of progress through machine and digital
technology, not by rejecting it, but by embracing it as a tool to continue the work of
dismantling the patriarchy. By flattening the false hierarchies put in place during the
Enlightenment, such artists make a case for the merging of ancient and modern technologies,
approaching spirituality and nature as crucial to humanity’s progress. This Spirit-led and
practice-based study is framed within Decolonial theory and examines how specific forms of
contemporary artmaking can be understood as a transformative, alchemical process that
explores the connections between spiritual, creative and technological practices. I begin by
establishing the hierarchies of knowledge that underpin contemporary scepticism of the
validity of spiritual and alchemical knowledges. Then, I critically analyse selected artworks by
contemporary Ecofeminist artists, who employ mixed modal approaches to artmaking,
spirituality and knowledge.
I present my personal body of work, through which I explore spiritually guided art practice as
a contemporary form of alchemy, with transformative potential that challenges the
separation of spirituality and technology. Finally, I argue that it is by integrating what are
commonly perceived as opposite ways of knowing that decolonisation and the
transformation of the socio-political is possible.