Metals, Part Two

[MUSIC] Most metals are governed by very specific laws. [MUSIC] When they melt, who they mix with, how they fall apart. [MUSIC] And the first of our two metals episodes, we spoke about lead, tin, iron, and copper. [MUSIC] This time, we're going to talk about metals that break the rules. [MUSIC] Unlike almost any other metal, for example, gold will never tarnish or fade. Silver can be melted down repeatedly without losing a drop. And mercury, law breaker number one, it isn't even solid at room temperature. There's beauty in danger, right? So I think the attractiveness is the sort of the lure, the shiningness, the sort of fluid nature of it. But hidden behind that beauty is like poison. Poison and death and illness. Oh, mercury, poison, danger, and incredible strangeness. But also enchantment and a lure that in the case we're about to describe, sparked a lifelong artistic practice. I go by Daniel, Kurolo, but I'm Mexican, so it's Daniel Carrillo. And my full name is Daniel Arturo, Carrillo Lozano, right? My, all my brothers have been hands on people, it's sort of just been labors and things like that. And we're always taking with the cars. I've always loved mechanical things. My brother took photography in high school. He was four or five years old, for me, six years old, I think. And he brought home a camera and that's when I was like, wow, what is this thing? Mercury is at the core of how Daniel's cameras work, allowing him to tap into some very old ways of creating and protecting a desired image. In ancient times, alchemists tried to transform lead into gold and mercury was the pivot point where such transformations began. Copper, lead, iron, and tin, I'll have more earthy hues. But once you hit mercury, the metals of alchemy are reminiscent of the lights in our skies. As we continue our exploration of the magical possibilities of metals, we're going to dive into the three final metals of alchemy, mercury, silver, and gold. I'm Camille Dunjee, and this is a material where we look at materials commonly used in art and learn what the materials themselves can teach us. We had this little jar with mercury and this workshop or lab that my father and my grandchild had. At the mat, scientists in charge, Makoleona, practices much more stringent safety procedures. But he had a lax approach to lab safety as a kid. He used to pour mercury on surfaces just to watch it roll around. I do not do this at home, but the other thing that was just so mesmerizing was sticking my finger in the mercury. Just imagine sticking your finger in very cold water that opposes some resistance because to move the mercury away, you're really pushing in something that's much heavier than water. It's 15 times heavier than water, denser than water. So you have to push it off your some resistance and it's cold because it conducts heat away from your body. So it's really a strange feeling. It's something unnatural. Another name for mercury is quick silver. I love how that word points directly to the strangeness of the metal. It looks like it should behave like silver, but it's far too fast and fluid. Mercury sticks to gold pretty readily and it sticks to a lot of metals. And it also destroys other metals as well. It doesn't like aluminum. It destroys aluminum. As Daniel says, mercury is volatile and just different. So it's got this sort of like hanger to it, this life to it, right? It's a very sort of like said beautiful and dangerous and sort of destructive and there's all these little characteristics that make it a very special thing. And it also helps you make pictures. Those pictures Daniel makes are called daguerreotypes. They are an extravaganza, a metallic photography. You start with a sheet of copper, then add a thin coat of silver plating. Polish that to a mirror like shine. This is key because the daguerreotype plate will act like a mirror that holds an image long after the sitter has moved on. Sensitize this mirror like plate with iodine vapors and then put it in the camera and expose it to light. Now remove the plate from the camera and use mercury fumes to bring the captured image to life and last of all, enhance and stabilize the likeness with the layer of gold. The med has many daguerreotypes featuring architecture, crumbling columns at the temple of Bacchus and panoramic views of ancient buildings across the type of river. And there's a lovely delicate one featuring 18 different exposures of the moon. But the med also has a whole lot of portraits including a pair of images called Cornelius Conway felt it with his hat and coat. The garretite portraiture seemed to be a medium that sometimes tempts people to get a bit playful. Harvard Greek literature professor Cornelius Feltin poses in the diptych's right side portrait. He looks buttoned up and steely and a little bit rumpled. Feltin isn't wearing the academic robes or silk top hats favored by portrait sitters of his stature. According to the Met's catalog, Feltin disdained constructing clothes. He'd rather be out in the world scaling ancient ruins. So in the panel on the left, Feltin's hand reaches for a broad floppy workman's hat, which is on a chair, a tap his coat. Feltin's body is out of the frame. The artist, John Adams Whipple, seems to have aided Feltin in constructing a portrait of his own absence. One of the splendors of daguerreotypes is their clarity. This is one of the reasons Daniel is drawn to the medium. They sort of read well because it's a shiny plate and there's the ability to capture a tremendous amount of detail. It's infinite. There's no grain to it. For the very first daguerreotype Daniel ever made, he went to a workshop at the former home of Kodak founder George Eastman. Eastman houses the oldest photography museum in the world and the workshop was a portal to the past. I flew down the Rochester and that's where I made that self-portrait. That was one of the first few plates that I ever made and that was interesting just to see yourself as you would be back in 1850, you know? That's how you would look. So the people haven't changed just the process has. In part one of our metallic exploration, we spoke about big things, giant bells and epic book of stories. Everything we'll discuss this time was made to fit in the hand. A daguerreotype was a direct reflection of yourself that you could hold. daguerreotypes because they're made from polished silver plates actually act not only as a photographic surface but also as a mirror. So they're called mirrors with memory and I think one of the most amazing things about interacting with a daguerreotype is this quality that you're both looking into an image from the past but also in a sense you're looking at your own reflection in the mirror surface. Steven Pinson, a photography curator at the Met, says that if we want to explore the origins of this form of photography we need to go to its source, a man named Louis Jacques Mandet de Gaire. He's best remembered as one of the fathers of photography but that's not how his career began. daguerre got his start on the stage. He was originally trained as a draftsman and painter and created set designs for the Parisian opera in the early 19th century and simultaneous to that. He was also working as a set designer for the theaters of the boulevard, you know, mostly popular melodramas and that's how he really made his name so daguerre was really working for the high and the low of the Parisian theater. daguerre was a show. showmen through and through. What set designs for high art operas and the more rough and tumble melodramas of street theater had in common was that they were meant to fool the eye. So DeGare took the concept a step further and developed something called the Paris diorama. If you ever had to bring a shoebox to life with paper cutouts and elementary school, you have been touched by DeGare's legacy. But the original dioramas were more like 19th century augmented reality. Think about it being both a building and the kind of paintings that were shown in the building. So you would walk into a darkened theater and there would be sort of a vestibule that the crowd would walk into. And in this chamber, there would be paintings that DeGare had made on the ceiling and there would be fabric, different colored fabric that would give you this sensation of being like in a kaleidoscopic space. You would be led into your seats and it would be dark but not completely dark because part of the whole sociability of the space was that you should be able to see and be seen. And then the curtain would lift and you would see this enormous scene in front of you, an enormous painting would be illuminated by natural light windows in the ceiling and by moving colored screens between the windows and the painting, DeGare was able to achieve these different lighting effects. So it would look like for instance, the sun would be rising or setting or a storm would move out over the scene and a rain storm would start little by little during the course of 10 to 15 minutes and then you would be rotated, the theater would be rotated and another scene would be revealed. And that would generally be an interior scene to contrast with the landscape that had been previously seen. I think he's often considered a Barnum-like character or even a Stephen Spielberg producing these grand spectacles for people. As with PT Barnum, part of the way DeGare implemented these grand spectacles was by manipulating what people saw and when. When he made a photograph, DeGare would hold out the plate to viewers after removing it from the camera. No image to be seen. And then the plate passed through Mercury vapor and came out transformed. DeGare types allowed us to hold up a surprisingly accurate mirror to ourselves. But people wondered if they could trust their eyes. From the beginning, photography has been dogged by the question of whether it was a form of art or just a trick of the light and at the inception of the form. That question swept away part of its creator's identity. Above all else, he sought recognition for being an artist. It was very difficult in 19th century perist to be recognized as a talented artist even though he clearly was. The invention of the DeGare type was kind of his last ditch effort to gain recognition as this very talented artist. Irony being that he became, you know, world famous as the inventor of this photographic process. Photography has come to be seen as a way of mechanically recording the world around us. But Stephen says that begs a question. Is the view of the world that's captured in a mysterious box a completely realist view of our surroundings? Or like the wonder of a diorama stage, is it something totally new? People didn't know how much credit to give an artist who's worked simply and directly reflected the world. Part of the problem is that no one knew how to think about the human behind the machine. What we think of when we think of modern art is the facture of an artist, the hand of an artist. And when DeGare introduced the DeGare type, you know, it was all about the fact that the artist was no longer necessary. The sun was doing everything automatically. All you needed to do was have the camera and the right chemicals and the sun would do the rest. And so ironically, DeGare by promoting the DeGare type and photography is this sort of automatic process removed the artist from the equation. So that's why he was for a long time, his prior career as a painter and as a decorator was completely forgotten. The Met has a DeGare type of Louis DeGare taken by an unknown photographer. DeGare was notoriously shy in front of the camera, so there aren't many images of him left. In this photo, he's seated with one arm resting on a table. He's squinting, his head cocked to one side and he's staring directly into the camera as it captures him. - It's a very interesting thing to be able to hold something that was there with the person or the thing. That image, you know, is a reflection, literally a reflection of what was there in front of it. There is no separation of, you know, this photograph was taken in digitally, sent off and you know, there's nothing like that. The photograph is the image and it's directly based off what was in front of it. - This particular image is damaged in the center, which makes its mirror like quality even more vivid. When you look at it, you see a fractured version of yourself superimposed on an 1844 image of one of the fathers of photography. Louis de Gares, vision of himself, remains constant, crystallized in time, even as the faces looking into that mirror change. 180 years after de Gares types were born, photography continues to reinvent its role in our lives. For one thing, it's sped up and got better at capturing the messy movements of the world. - If I think of photography, I think of Selma, I think of the girl with the napalm explosions in the back. I think of what photography has done to document atrocities but also to make people better by holding that mirror to our collective faces. - Like a de Gares type, Mercury itself is both an enigma and a reflection of us. And through photography, it began retraining us to see. But Mercury's not the only metal that can show us to ourselves. - Throughout history, I think if you look at the greatest stories of oppression, it's really about silver. - After the break, we'll find out why. Like Mercury, silver is often used in mirrors, but the image held up by silver is often unflattering. Mining is ugly work and often cruel, especially in antiquity and slave children were used because they were small enough to fit into slender shafts. Plenty of the elder once called mining a quest to draw out riches from the abode of the spirits of the departed. And in that quest, an untold number of people have lost their lives deep underground. Silver is one of the most valuable metals on the planet, but we are the ones who gave it that meaning. - Greed, unfortunately, is also a motor of discovery. And so chemistry was born out of that desire of squeezed the last bit of silver out and separated from the dull, annoying lazy lad. So determining how much silver you have in a coin or how much silver you have left in the rest of your ore. - People wanted all that silver because for a long time, the metal alone held value. But due to the sheer size of the Roman Empire, when they began extracting silver to make coins, the effects rippled across the world. - That intensification, I would say, of the minting of coins that happened during the Roman period. You can very clearly see because of studies that have been done, They leave this kind of layer of. of affecting the air is essentially and gets trapped in this ice course. - In other words, the Romans mine so much precious metal that it polluted Europe for 500 years. And this pollution was preserved in the ice sheets of Greenland. Harvard economic historian, Irene Sotemari, and says that state control over these materials was tightly maintained. - Silver in general and other precious metals also had their prestige long before coinage was invented properly. And I think it has to do with the durability of the metal in that case of both gold and silver. There's a reason why they've been chosen. It's because they last a long time and they don't change their physical form. So there's a sense of trust in what you have. - This need to create a sense of trust is crucial. Something we humans seem to long for across space and time. And trust is a big part of what the metals we are talking about in this episode help provide. So we invented coins, which revolutionized the way we thought about and used metals. - Metals have been used for us at unit of exchange for a long time, weight metal. But coins were only invented relatively recently. It's only been in the last, gosh, not even 25, yeah, 2500 years, maybe 2500 years that we've had coinage. So when we think about the economic history of humans, coinage is a very recent invention. - The Met has a vast collection of silver currencies. Some dating as far back as the third century BCE. Some feature the faces of powerful gods like Apollo or Zeus, whose abs are still admirably well-defined, even after more than 2000 years. Another one is inscribed with words from the Quran. And there's one that's so misshapen that it's practically as oblong as those pennies you press at tourist sites. Whereas some materials gain value through scarcity, coins maintain their value through a kind of muchness when there are a lot to move around. And at the core of their usefulness is the fact that we believe in their worth. - A coin has two values. The intrinsic value, which is the value of the metal, the quantity of gold, the quantity of silver or whatever precious metal is in them. And then the nominal value, which is what the coin is worth. So for example, right now we have coins that the state tells us are worth 25 cents. The content of precious metal in them is probably not worth 25 cents. So again, we have a discrepancy. We're being told by the state that the coin is worth this. So in that sense, you know, Fidukiya, you're trust if you do share your trust in the state because it's a system that's built on trust. If you think about checks, banknotes, all of these things were like, it's a higher authority telling you that this is legal tender, not the actual market value of the object. So that is why fiduciary means, and we see periods of fiduciary are quite heavily in antiquity. Sometimes especially when governments, most certainly in case the government, the Roman Empire, the Third Century, manipulate the coinage, telling them it's worth the same, even though they're decreasing and decreasing and decreasing the precious metal content in the coins. Silver coinage is yet another thing, the Romans borrowed from the Greeks. In ancient Greece, coins featured the symbols of cities. The goddess Athena for Athens or a rose on the silver di-dram from Rhodes. But after Rome adopted silver currency, its rulers began to place their own faces on coins, almost like a guarantee of value. There's a sloppiness to the Roman coins from that period. One of the coins from the Metz collection is called an Antoninianis, from the reign of Philip I, around 248 CE. The coin is cut slightly off-center. Philip's wife, Octa-Cilia Severa, stares sternly to the right, while beyond its intended edge, the coin flares into silver space. This coin was a source of inflation all by itself. The denomination was too denari, but from its inception, the silver content only equaled one and a half denari. It was further to based over time, as silver mines and spame were exhausted, and prices spiked in the marketplace. So here's this coin, messy and inaccurate. You could see it as a poorly executed means to an end, or you could see it as something else. We forget that at some point everything we used today had to be invented, says Benjamin Harnett. His original engineer for the New York Times and an independent scholar of ancient technology, like coins. Silver became this acceptable thing to pay your obligations to the state. And for the state to pay its obligations to you. And by you, I mean soldiers. During the Civil Wars with Caesar on one side, Pompey on the other, they both would issue coins and the same thing after with the Trumverett, with Antony and Octavian, and the third guy who nobody can ever remember. That guy is Marcus Milius Lebedes. They would have, it's called, moving with. Basically, they'd be minting coins on the go to pay their soldiers in sort of this frenetic action. And I can imagine that when you needed money really fast, the guy manning the mint would be like, you know, we can let those pass. Go ahead, the side of the coin is in the middle of the die. No problem. For the Romans, currency was inextricably linked to conquest. The standard silver coin, the denarius, was used to pay a soldier's wages. Currency circulation was driven by the coins in soldiers' pockets as they pushed the edges of empire further and further from Rome. In that way, silver coins were a tool of war. They were also a very effective form of advertising. One of the first things that a serpurs did when someone took a claim to the throne in a province or they served the throne, the first thing that they would do was to mint a coin. If you think about the fact that, you know, you would never see the emperor in your life. You don't want to know what he looked like, except from his face on coins. And maybe a statue of Eulifton Asciti or something that we erect a statue in his image. So the power of coins, a stool of propaganda, was unparalleled in the ancient world. The main tool of the face of the emperor was coin it. And it traveled everywhere. Julius Caesar was a master of this. One of his earliest in our E from around 49 BCE. Focus on his priestly implements as the leader of the ancient Roman religion, a ladle to pour out libations, a sacred axe for sacrifices, a ritual cap. As with many of these early coins, there is also an animal. In this case, an elephant linking Caesar to the victories of Alexander the Great. Another coin from this era features a neus and venus, the mother-senduo from whom Caesar claimed to be descended. In both cases, the focus was on the inevitability of Caesar's divine right to rule. Distributing the coins helped perform the almost religious slide of hand by which the state asked people to believe in it. Money, the coin, is a substitute as well for something else. And so there's this religious connection of coins to transubstantiation to some kind of like almost a magical process. And at the heart of that magic, Fadusia or trust. They were perfectly happy to use undervalued currency as long as they knew that the state was behind it, as long as they knew that that stamp was good. And so if you had a strong functioning government and a strong functioning society, the trust was in the coins. And a lot of libertarians and other people have this view that it's the coins that establish the trust. And it's really the reverse. It's the society that has to be in a good state and in a trusted state to make the coins valuable beyond their metal content. The interesting thing here is the trust also has to exist between you and me. It's not just that Julius Caesar says this coin is worth to denari-e. Caesar isn't in the marketplace with us. I have to trust that if you give me this coin to buy two denari-e worth of eggs, I can use it with the next person to buy an equivalent amount of bread. Currency shares a root with current as in the forward force of water in a river. The purpose of money is to move. We could decide collectively that we're going to use I don't know, pencils as a currency. And if you agree with it, I agree with it. I was like, "Okay, I give you three pencils for a sandwich." And then the next person would be like, "Oh, I'll give you four pencils for whatever." Like, it's just all you need to do is to people to agree. Anything can be used, as currency as long as there's trust between the two people exchanging a good. We've moved away from silver as a monetary standard. Instead, the dollar and euro are used across the world as trusted rates of exchange. Silver remains critical to the economy, particularly in electronics. But Mark O'Leona says that untathering it from currency has set silver free. Maybe silver, you know, of course, metals are not bad or good. But even if you think of them in this symbolic and loaded way, if you make them carriers of meaning, silver found redemption. But not all metals divorced themselves from finance. Our last metal started out as a tool of commerce. Then, ended up lending a sense of identity to an empire. And to hold it, it's a whole to kind of transformative power. First stop, a marketplace where the earth shimmers with gold. An early 19th century visitor to Kumasi, which is the capital of the Asante empire, witnessed the fact that the soils of the marketplaces, there were two marketplaces in Kumasi. The soil of these marketplaces were waft of at interval in order to collect the gold particles. And that could yield up to 800 ounces of gold dust. So it just, you know, gives you an idea of how much gold was circulating and gold dust was being exchanged in these marketplaces at the time. Yeah, El Biro is an Africanist art historian and former curator at the Met. She's talking about the Asante empire in what's now the country of Ghana. The Asante people are part of an ethnic group known as the Akhan, one of the major ethnic groups of modern day Ghana. Even though there were a number of Akhan states that were present and that already were dividing powers in the region before the early 18th century. At the end of the 17th and early 18th century is really the moment when the Asante empire rose to power, making use of its gold. And so as a result, the gold itself as a material became, came to symbolize the Asante empire. Gold is found in a variety of settings, Agara, from courts, veins to or deposits. But as often happens in gold rich areas, it was first found as the shining dust in the water. A luvial gold was just found in the rivers, which also helped locating and where, you know, larger minds might be located, but first it would be identified in the rivers, in the waters. As this the case with all the metals we've discussed, the Akhan people went to great links to extract all this gold. Those links reflect the materials value as part of a con culture and also as a crucial building block of empire. All the nuggets would have been the preregative of the chief, although mining activity was also subjected to taxes and so really most of the gold that was mined ended up for the state. And we're talking a lot of gold. Ganna makes up less than 1% of the cotton and slandmasks, but it is the largest gold producer in Africa. And unlike during the Roman Empire, Wemetto was minted into coins. In the Asante empire, your pocket change would have literally been dust. Meticulously calibrated gold weights, often cast in brass shapes that reference proverbs, were used to calculate the value of a bag of gold dust. The Mette has gold weights in the shapes of seed pods, grasshoppers, lobster claws, and small ceremonial sorts. My favorite looks like a chameleon with an armored back in abdomen. Three of the lizards four legs are positioned as if wrapped around a tree limb. The last leg sticks out away from the body, almost like the chameleon is preparing to push off its resting place and climb. Gold weights continue to be important cultural markers of both commerce and regional unity. Even now, there's a gold weight in the shape of a softfish depicted on both the coins and paper currency of the West African fronk. It's used in eight Francophone countries, including Ghana's immediate neighbors, Togo, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast. Gold is very, very, very important among the Asante. You know, it's a source of wealth. It's a source of identity. In June 1960, the colony formerly known as Gold Coast became the independently governed republic of Ghana. Yau Nyako was born in a craw just four months earlier. He's now an economics professor at New York University and also holds a ceremonial title in the Asante region of Ghana. I am a sub-chief. You know, there are different levels of chiefs and so I'm called the Abwa Fohini, the Komodo traditional area. Every 42 days I go back to Ghana, poor libation on the stools. The stools he's talking about are knee high, intricately carved wooden seats that are central to a con royal culture. Pooring libations on them is a way to show respect. And afterwards, you know, we're all gathered and I have something to say to the chief. Here's the problem with that. Yau isn't allowed to speak directly to the chief. None of the chief subjects are except for one. So I'll get up and you know, I'll lower my cloth a little bit as a sign of respect to the chief and then I'll look not at the chief but at the or Chiame. And O Chiame is a linguist. They're like a combination of ambassador, chief of staff and trusted council. And most important in an oral tradition, the O Chiame is the keeper of the chief's speech. So the O Chiame is a very, very important position, very important. The chief never talks directly to his people and his people never talk directly to him. It's always through the O Chiame. He's the ears and the voice of the chief. That's the primary rule of that. When we have these large gatherings of the chief and the people, you know, it's a big space. And sometimes when the chief speaks, you don't hear it, what he's saying or you don't hear all of it, you know, the chief is sitting down. He's surrounded by his people and his other chiefs. And so his voice doesn't necessarily boom out. The O Chiame is standing and so he can stand at a strategic place. He hears what the chief says and then he's like a microphone. He broadcasts it out. And the microphone goes both ways. If you want to be heard, the O Chiame is your best bet. Maybe one particular chief is there with his people and it's a big like all of the Ashanti chiefs are together. So there's a Komu chief, there's the driving chief, there's the Bekwai chief and you want to have a word with the Komu chief. So you go to the area where you know the Komu chief is there, you know you can't just go up to the Komu chief and talk. So what do you do? You look for the linguist. The linguist is the one who is going to allow you to speak to the chief. How do you know in a crowd who the linguist is? The linguist is holding the staff. There are two linguists, staffs of office that live at the Met. One of the measures just over five feet. As tall as my 11-year-old daughter, a thin layer of ornate gold foil covers the entire surface revealing the geometric designs carved on the wood underneath. Yet Alice says the foil would have been hammered in sections onto the carved wooden staff using tiny nails. It is a long cylindrical shaft that really is most of its height and then just at the top you have a finial that is a depiction of a spider position that the center of its web. The web is represented in open work so you can see through the threads of the web and also through the legs of the spider. And on both sides of the spider and on either side of the web itself you have two figures, two male figures that are standing looking towards one another. And each of the figures have one arm stretched ahead. The spider in this Ochaami staff of office represents the ultimate master of speech. Quiku Anancy. Anancy is a demigod who's at the center of storytelling in a contradiction. Every Gnei and child knows his name. I grew up in the village in a very small village and there wasn't always You know, we were actually in one of the better villages. We had electricity maybe three hours a day. But many nights there was no electricity at all. And so a whole bunch of us kids were going to sit, you know, on the corner of a house somewhere with like a little stoop or step, but we could all sit. And then there'll be like a 15-year-old. And you know, when you're 11, a 15-year-old is like a really big kid. And so we would shout, "Anasisaam, Anasisaam, meaning tell us an Anasi story, tell us an Anasi story." And then, you know, if we get lucky, we'll get one of these grown-up kids or come and say, "Okay, you younger kids, sit down, I am going to tell you an Anasi story." Anasi is a trickster who doesn't always play fair. But he also holds all the world's wisdom in his hands. The spider is used in many, many stories. So stories are all moving around the spider. One's upon its time, the spider met a lion, or the spider met a giraffe and asked, "You know, why do you have spots like this?" And then the story goes on. - The Accontradition is oral, which means skill with speech will get you a long way. - I mean, I could have of course tell you about beautiful language, how you can use language to sway people's opinions or to make them laugh or storytelling. It's all part of very, very rich language, which, you know, the Ashanti language is great for them. - And the link between beauty, wisdom, power, speech, and gold, all reside in the body of the linguist's staff. - And so you see gold on the staff to represent the wealth of the chief, that the linguist is, quote unquote, "serving." - Not all staffs of office were fully gilded. So Jan Joko says that the spider web staff must belong to the linguist of a particularly powerful chief. But a truly great Oteame was worth their weight and gold. - The linguists are normally chosen or trained to be great at speech. So a member of the audience will say something to the linguist, which needs to be passed on to the chief. And of course, the person saying it will say it in some not necessarily poetic way. Somebody says, you know, I think we need to hurry up and do something, right? That's what the person says. And then the linguists will translate it as saying, "Dear chief, this man who just spoke, he says, "we should make ourselves light." Because when we are light, you can go fast. You see what I mean? So hurry up has become, make yourself light. Little things like that is what the linguists do, which just makes the speech beautiful. - There we are again, with the transformative power of gold. The linguist ability to translate is inextricably linked to the staff itself and the metal that coats it. The staff is what makes speech possible. But maybe there are other ways to communicate values. Jan Jarko is in the process of establishing a network of museums in settings like palaces and shrines. Plus a research center that will hold contemporary art. - The collecting focus for almost all of the museum but for one part is telling the story of the people. We have a very beautiful story. You know, I'm writing the history of the Komu area. And you know, the colonial period, the white man, it's not that major. We were doing our own stuff. The stories are being told without them. - It's not just staffs that hold the power to speak. All artifacts carry stories layered within them. - We have these, it's called Batakari. When you're going to war, there's this particular kind of a garment that you'd wear. And the garment has little like amulets. It almost look like bottle caps. And so those were like charms or goodwill things that the chief would wear when going to war. Things like that are the things that we like to collect. Because once you have them there, then you can tell the story about how the wars used to take place. You can tell a story which will connect the object to the people's history. So the goal is to collect things, to tell people about the way we lived, the way we believed, how we did things. - Maybe that's what all museums do. Empower objects to speak and share stories they hold inside. Objects that reflect who we are, who we have been, and perhaps who we may one day become. It's that curiosity that keeps us coming back over and over again. To see all the ways that metals have been used, from gold weights to staffs, to the work of the contemporary Gennian artist, Elinachi, whose gleaming waterfalls of woven metal bring yet another dimension to traditional Akhan Kintekla. Perhaps despite their connections to empires and greed, violence and danger and poison, even when they're breaking the rules, we've learned to trust metals, to depend on them. Because metals give us a way to tell the story of us. As Marco Leona says, - When you look at materials and the meanings they carried, and the aesthetic, cultural, social, religious, economic motivation behind choices. So we look at the materials, we look at the gold, the iron, the copper, the tin, the arsenic, but we really want to discover something about the people who put them there. - Alchemy is a process of transmutation, the mythical path that metals followed on the road from lead to gold. The seven metals of Alchemy course through our bodies and are reflected in our skies. They capture us, our images, our stories, are reaching toward the divine. Everything made of metal performs a kind of magic act, suspend your disbelief and watch it transform into something else, a weeping puppet, a frozen mirror, a book of stories, a staff that holds the speech of an empire, and even the coins in your back pocket. Little pieces of trans-substantiation that travel in our hands. We imbue them with meaning, and in return, they give us value. They show us who we are. I'm Camille Dunci, and this is a material. Immaterial is produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. This episode was produced by Adroa Jimma Brinnell. Our production staff also includes Jesse Baker, Elise Blutter Hacett, Alan Arcagan, and Eric Newsom. And from the Metropolitan Museum, Sarah Wombold, Benjamin Corman, Rachel Smith, and Douglas Heggley. This season would not be possible without Sophie Anderson. Sound Design by Ariana Martinez, Engineering by Ariana Martinez and Palsh Knighter. This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher, fact-checking by Christine Baird. The podcast is made possible by Dasha Zukova-Niarkos. Additional support is provided by Bloomberg for Lent peace. This episode would not have been possible without Gael Biro, former curator of African art. Stephen Pinson, curator of photographs. Michael Seymour, associate curator in the department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Alan Shapiro, Dietrich von Bothmer Research Scholar. Bobby Walsh, assistant collections manager in the department of photographs. And special thanks to Lauren Johnson, and Kwabana and Rose Jimmabranpa. To check out the Otyame staff, a selection of daguerreotypes, and all those silver coins, visit the Met's website at metmuseum.org. I'm Camille Dungee.