Are They Rocks or Clouds? | Marina Caneve

It blends research with photography and is based on the hypothesis of a large-scale hydrogeological disaster in the Dolomites. The project refers to the possibility of the floods and landslides that devastated the region in 1966 repeating themselves after a hundred years. Confronting the spectre of a disaster that could happen within the next fifty years – close but not immediate – gave Caneve the opportunity to go beyond documenting an event as it happened. She avoids recreating traditional imagery of the mountain that amplifies its sublime and monumental aspects. She instead creates a new, uncertain imagery that allows us to explore, decode, and re-observe the landscape. Caneve pushes us to face our vulnerability in living and experiencing our place in the environment. She also addresses her questions to the medium of photography itself, interrogating its possibilities and its limits.

Are They Rocks or Clouds? oscillates between the documentary and the poetic. Its variations are a metaphor for the stratification of different rocks that represent the internal structure of mountains, revealing their geological epochs and other peculiarities. At the same time, these features show the fragility of the mountains by exposing how at various points their slopes have collapsed. Events have taken place, are taking place in ways that are often barely visible, and will continue to take place into an incalculable future. As Georges Didi-Huberman, the French philosopher and art historian, wrote in Sentir le grisou (Smell the Firedamp), ‘We can expect that thinkers, history and perhaps artistic activity will alert us to the looming catastrophes.’

Caneve’s camera is directed towards the landscapes of her childhood and towards the people who live in and with the mountains and who know perfectly well the dangers of living in such an environment, framing and organising these temporal modulations. For Caneve, seeing and imagining this vulnerability is a way of relating materially to it.