—contemplatio in calgine divina
“Do not think technology first: rocket and the lift off of the rocket. Look instead, like in the depths of a closed eye, into the opacity of knowledge where, forming one with it, the rocket passes through infinite distances. Think according to the knowledge that steers the rocket as if in a dream, heavier and more transparent than the boundless night it penetrates with a silent thunderclap.” Like the French philosopher, François Laurelle, I do not think of technology when I lose myself in the collodion nightscapes that Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer creates. No cameras, no apps, no programs. I feel instead the depths of a closed eye (strangely, not my own), a boundless night, a silent thunderclap.
Nikolova-Kratzer had the idea of an “emotional imprint” in mind when she embarked on this series of abstractions she calls “Elemental Forms.” The chemistry of each collodion photogram improvises in the mood of Japanese Butoh on the surface of black aluminum. The landscapes that emerge may hint at a river, a tree line, a fire in the offing, a star. But you get the feeling, as Laurelle describes it, that darkness has its own transcendental order, “into which [we] never entered and from which [we] will never leave.”