Cloud Watching
Festival de Arte Analógica São Paulo (FAASP)
1–30 May, 2026 • São Paulo, Brazil
Lie down on the ground and look up at the sky, searching for any resemblance in the contours, volumes, and shapes of the clouds. A rabbit, perhaps, dissolving into a horse, then a tree, a bridge, a kettle, a wave. The particles of water suspended in the air draw ever-changing suggestions, ephemeral signs to be invented and decoded by the viewer. A contemplative activity of children, lovers, and dreamers, cloud watching exercises a certain capacity for reverie: after all, what can we apprehend from clouds beyond what we imagine in them?
Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us, in When Images Touch the Real, that “just as there is no form without formation, there is no image without imagination.” An inscription of light in silver gelatin, the photographic image is simultaneously a documentary trace of reality and an invention of it. In our everyday lives, saturated with images and post-truths, thinking about the imaginative nature of photography means understanding its existence as a complex and socially entangled object.
After all, images and image archives lie at the center of our aesthetic, technical, political, historical, and cultural universe. In the private and domestic sphere, photography is an object capable of holding memory, a material trace of a past time subject to all kinds of movements of affect. The last photograph of a loved one who has passed away is a treasure to be preserved, while photographs from a relationship that has come to an end may be destroyed or discarded. As Foucault said, “the archive is characterized by its gaps” — each surviving image bears witness to what has been lost. Every memory is perpetually threatened by forgetting.
In this exhibition, Daura Campos experiments with the artistic gesture of intervening in photographic negatives, an area of research that has occupied her for the past three years. Through chemical and manual processes, the image spills out and dissolves into colorful clouds of increasing abstraction, moving ever further from the realist objectivity of the photographic image.
Finding a second life for negatives abandoned in commercial laboratories, antique fairs, or shoeboxes around the world, Daura proposes a permanently shifting archive. In contrast to a world oriented toward the virtual, this practice, which foregrounds the materiality of photographic film, provides a surface onto which we can project our own signs, recognize ghosts, or fictionalize memories. The gap in the archive ceases to be merely its symptom and takes center stage. We can look at these images as we look at clouds — an invitation to the fundamentally human act of reverie that we call imagination.
Giovanna Almeida Cunha
