Nature failure is inevitable,
we can only face it.
Photography usually documents a catastrophe that has just happened or records the traces
of events far back in time. Are They Rocks or Clouds? is rather an attempt to foresee a future catastrophic event. 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 avoided recreating traditional imagery of the mountain that amplifies its sublime and monumental aspects. She instead created 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.
(..) as the mountain as metaphor is poetry while the mountain recognized as a real source of danger alludes to the documentary, for which evidence is to be mounted to account for the monitoring of its moving, or testimonies to be gathered after an accident or a catastrophe. - Taco Hidde Bakker, Are They Documents or Poems?
‘Are They Rocks or Clouds?’ addresses the history of hydrogeological events in the Dolomite mountains and, more broadly, how our cultural memories of such incidents are shaped. The work explores how human habitation persists in locations that have established patterns of landslides, floods, and other such possible catastrophes and therefore comprises a blend of research and archival images, texts, and recent photographs woven together to address the themes of Destruction, Protection, Experience, Representation and Resilience in areas with centuries-long cycles of human vulnerability in the face of natural disasters. ‘Are They Rocks or Clouds?’ balances information, history and visual pleasure as the reader is asked to confront the risks we take, as humans, in our effort to live comfortably while also pushing the limits of how we interact with the natural world.
- Lesley A. Martin, The Dummy Photobook Prize, Cortona On The Move, 2018
Are They Rocks or Clouds? is a multifaceted series of photographs that benefits from the indeterminacy that, on the one hand, underpins poetry and, on the other, is the boundary of science, all without succumbing to the ambiguity of the one or the presumption of the other, because, to cite the science historian D. Graham Burnett, “conclusions should, as a rule, be treated with suspicion. - Raffaele Vertaldi, Domus 1034
‘Are They Rocks or Clouds?’ book is designed by Hans Gremmen and is published by Fw:Books and OTM.The photobook blends images and text; are included three essays and a Coda.
Essays:
Taco Hidde Bakker (Writer and curator), Are They Documents or Poems?
Emiliano Oddone (Geologist), The Gravity of Beauty
Annibale Salsa (Anthropologist), The Knowledge Defect
Selected writings:
ASX American Suburb X - Essay by Eugenie Shinkle & Sunil Shah
GUP Magazine - Book review by Tim van Dijk
Il Post, Sono rocce o nuvole? - Article by Alessia Mutti
Vogue - Interview by Chiara Bardelli Nonino
Exhibitions:
Are They Rocks or Clouds?, Switch Lab and IIC Bucharest, solo show, curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva (Bucharest, ro, 2023)
Earthlings, Atelier Néerlandais, curated by Jenny Smets (Paris, fr, 2021)
Not only history, but our memories, curated by Carlo Sala, Podbielski Contemporary (Milan, it, 2020)
Sguardo Lucido, Fotohof, curated by Andrew Phelps and Herman Seidl (Salzburg, at, 2019)
Are They Rocks or Clouds?, Cortona On The Move, curated by Arianna Rinaldo (Cortona, it, 2019)
F4 Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, curated by Carlo Sala (it, 2019)
Looking On – MAR Ravenna, curated by Giulia Ticozzi and Osservatorio Fotografico (it, 2019)
Emerging Talents, Mattatio, Roma, curated by Arianna Catania and Sarah Carlet (it, 2018-2019)
Giovane Fotografia Italiana, Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia, curated by Daniele De Luigi (it,2018)
Awards:
Prix Pictet, Shortlisted (2025, uk/ch)
Premio Graziadei VII Edition, Special Mention, (2020, it)
Prix du Livre, Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards, Finalist (2020, fr)
Premio Marco Bastianelli (2020, it)
Cortona On The Move Book Dummy Award (2018)
Premio Giovane Fotografia Italiana, FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA – Reggio Emilia (2018, it)
Unseen Dummy Award 2017 e La Fàbrica – Photo London Book Dummy Award, Shortlisted (2018, es-uk)
