The Philosopher’s Stone (2021)

Created during an international research residency at CACiS – Contemporary Art and Sustainability Centre, Calders, Catalonia – The Philosopher’s Stone by Nathalie Rey and Enric Maurí is a video installation that explores transformation, artifice, and the blurred boundaries between nature and consumption. The project includes a supermarket-style metal shelf displaying profiterole boxes made of stones wrapped in melted plastic, and a 14-minute single-channel video. The short film was selected for the 2021 edition of Panoràmic Festival (Barcelona), dedicated to cinema, photography, and new media.

The film reimagines motifs from Jacques Demy’s Peau d’âne (1970) and the 1904 silent adaptation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale. It follows a clumsy fairy, wearing a blonde wig like Catherine Deneuve, who attempts to cook a dessert with magical powers. As the narrative unfolds, identities and realities blur until the fairy’s culinary experiment collapses into absurdity. She finally turns to mass-produced pastries, devouring them in a quest for pleasure.

By fusing alchemical symbolism with everyday consumer imagery, The Philosopher’s Stone critiques the food industry’s manipulation of taste, quality, and desire. The handmade and the industrial, the edible and the toxic, coexist in a grotesque parody of contemporary abundance. Profiteroles made of stone and plastic infiltrate supermarket shelves, indistinguishable from their sugary counterparts. Drawing on the ancient bond between art and magic, the work turns the “stone” into a metonym for pristine nature and the profiterole into a symbol of artifice. As the two merge, the boundary between natural and synthetic dissolves, echoing the modern alchemist’s pursuit of eternal happiness and the ever-elusive promise of immortality.