Typology and phantasy are elements of Cosmic Cathedral, a video piece by Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, in which the expressive repertory of alchemy, its systems of order and material ideas merge with seemingly surrealist imagery.

Two alchemists alternately make use of various apparatuses and generate sequences of actions related to the index of Fulcanelli’s Le Mystère des cathédrales from the 1920s, the last alchemist text written by a legendary Frenchman (to this day Fulcanelli’s identity has not been fully clarified.) Fulcanelli interprets the sacral architectures of the Gothic period as expressing a secret language, borrowing from alchemist symbolism as well as esotericism.

Alchemy is the idea of changing the essence of a material by handling or processing it in a special way – which is basically a sculptural idea. The type of the alchemist has already appeared several times in the work of Hanakam & Schullers as the precursor of the photography adept in INVASION (2010), as an element of the video role-play TRICKSTER (2014), a ‘fluidum’ in the picture series Profile (2015-16). The concepts of Hanakam & Schuller are also informed by historical text sources dating from the 18th to the early 20th century.



The works by Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller focus on certain aspects of popular culture and elaborate on the role that the artifact plays here – as a marketing instrument, as a game device, as apparatus, or as fetish. In the process they reflect and ironize various historical and contemporary artistic strategies as well as their means of expression. They work primarily in the realm of video, interactive computer applications, drawing and applied forms of art.