nuvolario (translation: Cloud Atlas)

Application summary

In 2023, I began studying clouds; the ephemeral element par excellence. Part of a ten-year journey transfiguring the outer and inner landscape on stage; cirrus, stratus, nimbuses and breaths create a taxonomy of air that crosses theatre and its celestial artifices. Nuvolario (transl.: cloud atlas) is a quest of the ephemeral and transformative power of theatre inviting us to look up, a tribute to the visual power of clouds in the simplest of the theatrical homage; that of seeing what isn’t there, seeing what lies between the folds of the visible. Relegated to the domain of vagueness and considered objects of childish pastime for their tendency to hide celestial landmarks, for long time clouds have been perceived as the enemy of clear thinking, the nemesis of philosophers and scientists. However, clouds have been a device for deciphering reality, revealing the deceptive transparency of the air and signalling other atmospheric phenomena; an aspect that, combined with their changing nature, has made them the obsession of painters and photographers. Far from being an idyllic image, clouds are visible only from a distance; if you get too close they conceal themselves and the atmosphere by becoming tangible, by condensing water around impure particles such as silver-iodide. Silver-iodide is an inorganic compound triggering could-seeding. Highly photosensitive, it’s been a key element of the first photographic development technique (daguerreotype) and it’s been copiously used in the Manhattan Project which led to the atomic bomb and the mushroom cloud. In line with the ghosts of reality I chase, nuvolario explores the elusive vertigo of celestial landscapes and their precipitation in our present. Clouds are the rare moment in which the atmosphere materialises and, in nuvolario, they become the stratagem to bring back theatre to its original evanescence.