Marina Caneve Are They Rocks or Clouds?
Val di Zoldo. Destruction #02, 2018
Series
Photography usually documents an event that has already happened. This project instead is an attempt to foresee a future catastrophe, a repeat of the floods and landslides that devastated the Dolomites in northern Italy in 1966.
Caneve avoided revisiting the traditional sublime and monumental imagery of the mountain. She rather created a new, uncertain imagery that allows us to explore, decode and re-observe the landscape. The series oscillates between the documentary and the poetic. Its variations are a metaphor for the stratification of the rocks that show the structure of mountains, revealing their geological epochs and their fragility, where at various points their slopes have collapsed.
Caneve’s camera is directed towards the landscapes of her childhood, towards the people who live in and with the mountains and who know their dangers. Seeing and imagining this vulnerability are a way of relating materially to it.
About the photographer
Belluno, Italy, 1988
Italian
Belluno, Italy
About Marina Caneve
Caneve explores the interaction between photography and research. She emphasises the stratification between disciplines and languages, and her projects mainly arise from questioning stereotyped and direct narratives. She is currently researching the idea of ecosystems, both environmental and cultural.
In 2023, Caneve received the Italian Council fellowship for On the Ground Among the Animals, promoted by FMAV (Fondazione Modena Arti Visive) and UGM (Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia). This project has toured several venues as a solo exhibition including FMAV, UGM and CAP Centre d’art de Saint-Fons near Lyon, France. It was also shown at Paris Photo in 2024.
Caneve’s work has also been exhibited in institutions including Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria (2019); La Triennale, Milan (2021) and MAXXI, Rome (2021 and 2023).
Are they Rocks or Clouds? has won numerous awards including the Giovane Fotografia Italiana, now the Luigi Ghirri Award, and the Dummy Award at Cortona on the Move, Italy, both in 2018. It was published as a photobook by Fw:Books and won the Bastianelli Award for best Italian photobook in 2019. It was also nominated for the Prix du livre at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France in 2019. Public and private collections that include Caneve’s work include CAP Saint-Fons; ICCD, Rome and FMAV, MAXXI and Mufoco in Milan.
Her other major publications include On the Ground Among the Animals, published by Fw:Books, selected for Best Dutch Book Designs in 2024; and CALAMITA/À, an investigation into the 1963 Vajont dam disaster in Italy. Caneve is co-founder of CALAMITA/À, an interdisciplinary platform focusing on catastrophes, awarded the Strategia Fotografia fellowship in 2023.