CHALAZAE (2005)

Samantha Krukowski
2005, 4min 48, color

"Eggs, shot on glass from below and above, are the primary image material for Chalazae. When I was eight, I called the chalazae the thingy. It is actually the anchor that holds down the yolk membrane and separates the yolk from the white of an egg. Throughout my childhood, I refused to eat any egg that had a thingy--my mother obliged me and removed the thingies of any egg she hoped to feed me. I was convinced the thingy (the chalazae) was a baby chicken, or at least the starting point for one. My mother took me to her biology lab a lot, and there were always eggs and chickens in various stages of development. I saw chicken embryos on yolks and thingies nearby. That was enough to empower the chalazae and invest in it a series of meanings and capacities that continue to be largely imagined. I am particularly interested in the cellular, cosmic and embryonic forms evoked in Chalazae."

excerpts from a talk given at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference, 2003:

"The egg is a common alchemical symbol. The retort, the alchemists’ bulb-shaped vessel, was called the Philosopher’s egg. It was used for gentle distillation and cohobation and could be hermetically sealed, so that the various materials inside could incubate.
The egg was, more importantly, perceived as an image of the universe, the macrocosmos."

"A few months ago, I trained my video camera on some glass. I positioned my camera below the glass, and began to crack eggs onto it. Some of the eggs were frozen... Some of the yolks broke, some stayed intact. While working on the video, I recalled some writing by Simone de Beauvoir:
'With her fire going, woman becomes a sorceress; by a simple movement, as in beating eggs or through the magic of fire, she effects the transmutation of substances...'"

"Michael Maier’s, a German alchemist, wrote in his Scrutinium Chymicum of 1687: 'Learn about the egg and cut it with a flaming sword. In our world there is a bird more sublime than all others. To search for his egg be thy only concern. The egg of alchemy is a symbol for magical realization.'"

"There is something in these alchemical descriptions that parallels the process of embryogenesis, which metaphorically might be considered the birthplace of all works. The blastocyst is a universal subanimal formed by simple cell division, a volvox-like ball. Its organization is ancient, primary, and panspecific, affecting all eggs in much the same way. Regardless of their ultimate destiny, the component cells of a blastocyst first arrange themselves in a hive of sibling balls, a mold from which individual animals can be shaped. Blastulation is a cosmic event…it denotes the creation of primal matter—an ushering of one into many, unity into multiplicity, timelessness into time, inertia into mutability, information into form."

EXCERPTS VIA HERE