In Natasha Kuederli's series 'Heavens', the sky dominates the gaze. However, the image is desecrated of its iconic representativeness as if the artist's hands could shape the material, overturn, overturn its uniqueness. As if reality itself did not exist, and its properties depended on the observer. A reference to the theory of relativity is strong, to the graininess of matter. These works of spatial recomposition, that deconstruct the vision, and de-configure the codes of photography, physically break with the support and therefore with the two-dimensionality of the surface, giving continuity to intentions that we already find in the history of art. I am thinking of the pioneering gestures of Brassaï, or of the lesser-known 'Fotoformas' of the Brazilian Geraldo de Barros. Not to mention some surrealist visions of Man Ray.
This series, therefore, adopts teaching that several avant-gardes had announced even before the advent of digital, that is, that photography can invent, build, decontextualize the gaze. The importance of this series of works in fact lies in restoring dignity to the viewer, inviting him to see actively rather than passively. However, this is no longer an experimental and even less marginal procedure. In the cuts used by Kuederli, I find, for example, the contemporary work of Julia Kater of which Urbanautica has not only written but has exhibited works in Venice in recent years.
With respect to the theme of the sacred, this plurality of skies and stratifications of nature almost lead us to the cosmogony of Dante or the Middle Ages, when we thought for example that the Earth was a sphere at the center of the universe surrounded by 9 heavens; around these 9 heavens, there was a tenth called Empyrean which therefore enclosed the whole universe and beyond which nothing existed. The human being therefore does not stop speculating about the afterlife and its representation. And art continues to be the means to express this tension.
