nuvolario #Helena

According to an alternative version of the myth, Helen never went to Troy. It was a cloud that went there, a piece of sky, an eidolon, a ghost of air in the guise of Helen; a celestial deception. Pareidolia is a stratagem, a faint hallucination or a cloudy pretext for starting a war that has defined Western culture. It is no coincidence that Euripides wondered: “And for a cloud we have suffered so much, just for that?”

In nuvolario #Helena, Maria Isidora Vincentelli’s body becomes, literally, a meteor. A rotating movement that vanishes into the sky, eluding the violence that reduces complex and ever-changing phenomena to controllable syntax.

How can the ephemeral be captured in a syntax? Grammatical logics are imposed on elusive landscapes, and if a cloud or a river misbehaves, we invent the language of risk: flash flood, flood, hurricane, violence, subsidence, war.

Hydrology, mythology, and sociology reveal the logics of domination that discipline landscapes and bodies through maps, borders, and systems of classification. Against the static nature of the line, nuvolario #Helena sets the mutability of air as a metaphor for a matter and an existence that elude control.

Cultural taxonomies all resemble one another, and we must remember, always remember, that “the map is not the territory”.

nuvolario is a project that looks upwards, an observation of the transformative power of clouds in the most illusory mechanisms; seeing what is not there. Relegated to the domain of vagueness by their tendency to conceal celestial references, clouds have long been perceived as the enemy of clear thinking, the nemesis of philosophers and scientists. Yet they have always deciphered reality by revealing the deceptive transparency of the air and signalling other atmospheric phenomena; an aspect that, combined with their shape-shifting nature, has made them the obsession of painters, photographers, meteorologists and the military.

Filippo Andreatta explores the elusive vertigo of celestial landscapes and their precipitate into our present. Visible only from afar, clouds are the rare moment when the atmosphere materialises, a taxonomy of sky forms getting through the stage and its celestial artifices.

Evanescent as a cloud, the project constantly changes shape while remaining unchanged in its name: nuvolario.