Religion Matters: Alchemy After the End

Alchemy After the End: Posthuman Ritual Aesthetics

This lecture begins not with a thesis, but with a memory - an encounter with art before our speaker had the language to understand it. From Matthew Barney’s surreal flesh-rituals at the Guggenheim, to Marina Abramović’s embodied thresholds at MoMA, to the luminous slowness of Bill Viola’s installations in Monterrey - Roberto Jones returns, again and again, to moments where art doesn’t just represent transformation. It enacts it. This lecture explores how contemporary artists use ritual, symbolism, and esoteric references to reimagine what it means to be human. Drawing from esotericism studies, posthuman theory, and art history, he asks: how does art become a site of symbolic transmutation - where spirit, body, and technology converge?

Bio

Roberto Jones Romo is an educator, art historian, and political scientist with extensive experience in interdisciplinary teaching and research. For him, art is a series of brushstrokes, essays and verses that operate as confessions, each personal and lovely, teaching him to remain curious about the stories that make each person unique, even those that may seem at first terrifying or crushingly sad, because in these stories, one finds life is not so mysterious after all but rather just a combination of greetings, conversations, and farewells.