Lost Clouds Archive draws on old archival material from the Meteorological Service of Catalonia (SMC) and goes on a journey exploring various archives in Catalonia, following its main protagonists – SMC patron and passionate meteorologist Rafael Patxot i Jubert, photographer Josep Pons i Girbau, the Campo family in Fabras, and then director of SMC and Barcelona observatory Eduard Fontserè. It is an investigation and a journey through the Catalan landscape.
Visitors can enter the exhibition through Ag47 Gallery as well as Kogo Gallery. Kogo Gallery houses the part of the exhibition that tells the story of the intertwined histories of meteorology and photography, drawing on material from the archives of the Meteorological Service of Catalonia – a story of work and dedication, disappearance and destruction, preservation and conservation.
The story unfolds through the works in the exhibition as well as Andres Galeano’s publication FPN (Fons Perdut de Núvols (in Catalan) / Lost Cloud Background). The structure of the book was inspired by the International Atlas of Clouds and States of the Sky, published in 1932, and its 13 × 18 cm format is a reference to the photo-sensitised glass plates, a medium once widely used to photograph the daily formation of clouds. The box-format publication includes a booklet with texts by experts in the history of meteorology and photography as well as contemporary art; added to it is a selection of images showcasing a possible archival collection. Leafing through the thin unbound sheets of paper gives the experience of carefully digging into an archive and making connections based on what you see. The whole project represents time as an artistic factor and an aesthetics of degradation.
In Ag47 Gallery, the visitors enter a self-service photographic studio where they can take selfies against a background of the clouds of their choice. Here, Andres Galeano stages a modern version of a mid-19th-century photographic studio offering carte de visite portraits, often against a backdrop of painted clouds. You are welcome to share your photos to contribute to the artist’s research project #TheWeightOfTheClouds. Today’s smartphones are much like the historical carte de visite photographs. The backs of these photographs were adorned with the studios’ emblems, which are echoed by the phone cases shown in the exhibition, providing food for thought about the meaning of capturing photographs, spectacle in our lives, and the mechanisms and effects of the digital storage of photographs.
The artist plays with the semantic ambiguity found in the Romance languages in the words tiempo and temps (in Spanish and Catalan, respectively), which can mean both time and weather, and fondo and fons, which can mean both an archive and background. It is at this point that the materials from the SMC archive intertwine with the studio photography of the time – its ethereal, weightless and celestial production qualities.
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