Although less publicized than the daily dose of drama or the turmoil of our planet, and more cryptic, an event quietly troubled the beginning of the year 2016. Gravitational waves were discovered by American scientists which, like an interstellar ripple, pull at the very fabric of space-time of our universe. It is enough to make the blood of any earthling curdle.
Light, the photographer’s tool, usually sculpts matter: Sarker Protick and Katrin Koenning, however, use light to record darkness, as if in relief. The publishing house Chose Commune invited the two artists to collaborate, thousands of miles apart, by juxtaposing their photographs taken with smartphones, then editing them and printing them on black paper using metallic ink.
This original process reverses the usual points of reference: everything in Astres Noirs seems to be emerging from the dark, cloaked in mystery. We can distinguish faces, landscapes, and all sorts of “life forms”—animal or plant, which should evoke elements of our habitual, reassuring surroundings. But everything appears otherworldly, as if seen from another planet, by a different kind of perception. Our everyday world, the only one we know, has been suddenly splattered by a syrupy bath of strange, nyctalopic power, sweeping the planet at various levels, speeds, and distances all at the same time. The earth glows, and sometimes eyes do. We traverse caves and explosions and accumulate details, trying to understand, sometimes surprised by an encounter, confused by a smile, or by a bird that, from his branch, has seen it all.
INFORMATIONS
Astre Noir
168 pages
79 B&W photographs
16 cm x 22 cm
May 2016
1500 copies
More informations : http://www.chosecommune.com/fr/book/astres-noirs-edition-standard/
