2026
Aqua Vitae is a series of wet-plate collodion portraits of the characters and worlds of Animalia Paradoxa, Merrimundi and Vitanuova.
The photographs take the form of an archive unearthed from a dystopian future. They seem to have been found beneath layers of rubbish and earth, among the archaeological sediments of a world that has buried its own remains. Faces surface through stains, scratches and veils of silver, as though the ground were slowly giving back the images it had swallowed.
In this imagined future, the characters have learned to make photography again from scratch. With minerals, raw chemicals and discarded fragments of glass and metal, they reconstruct a lost technology. They find a way to hold light in matter once more: to capture it in minerals, in earth, and let an image emerge.
We created more than 50 wet-plate collodion photographs; the images shown here are a selection from that body of work. The glass and metal plates were embedded in large adobe bricks, each more than 100 years old.
Funding
Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes, FONDART.
Exhibitions
Aqua Vitae — Casa Fósfora
Aqua Vitae — Tagua Tagua Galleries
Process
These photographs grew out of a three-year investigation carried out with Fósfora and Espora Taller between 2023 and 2026. Through trial and error, we learned the wet-plate collodion process ourselves, beginning with the raw materials and preparing our own collodion. Learning the chemistry, building the tools and making the photographs became parts of the same investigation.
We built our camera from a discarded photographic copying camera from the 1960s, found in the rubbish, and used 3D printing to make the holders for the plates. With this recovered and rebuilt equipment, we were able to take the photographs ourselves.
Most of the prints are on glass and measure approximately 12 × 25 cm. The formats range from small fragments of 2 × 4 cm to plates as large as 30 × 50 cm. Some are on aluminium, as ferrotypes or tintypes.
The collodion is prepared by dissolving nitrocellulose in alcohol and ether. The plate is coated with this solution and then sensitised in a silver nitrate bath.
The Collodion project
Credits
Created by
Niles Atallah @nilesatallah
Norkys Saraí @besodelnorte
Martin Velasco @_marvlas
Coni Maldonado Dávila @coni_maldav
José Tomás Urrutia Goldsack @jotaugo
Hans von Marees Peede @hansucio
Made at
Espora Taller @espora.taller
Fósfora @fosfo.ra
