INTERNATIONAL CLOUD ARCHIVE Vol.1 (2017-2019)
For centuries, the sky has been conscripted into the service of borders. Invisible lines were drawn across it to claim what cannot be possessed, using constellations, meridians, and the coordinates of an earthbound logic. Later, satellites replaced stars as reference points, translating the shifting atmosphere into fixed, militarized grids.
The clouds in this archive are captured from various locations around the world, but it is not possible to determine their exact origins. Each fragment of sky resists its assigned geography, slipping away from the coordinates that attempt to bind it. The image reveals nothing of the ground below — no passport, no territory, no jurisdiction, no geopolitical location, just the day and the time it has been witnessed.
This is the absurdity of mapping the ground from the sky: to turn a fluid, borderless expanse into a tool of enclosure.
International Cloud Archive asks: what if the sky could unlearn these lines, and return to being only what it is — a moving, borderless commons, impossible to own?
The International Cloud Archive is an ongoing attempt to think another kind of ground in a time when philosophers and critical thinkers insist that no stable ground exists. The name was not chosen out of any romantic attachment to the notion of “internationalism” in art, but as a deliberate exposure of its absurdity: the idea that the Earth can be sliced into measurable zones to control movement, as if the atmosphere could be conscripted into the service of borders. Every cloud in the archive was recorded from within a geopolitical location, yet in the image its coordinates dissolve — it refuses to reveal its place of origin. This incompatibility between the fluid, cyclical forces of tides, energy, and air, and the rigid systems humans have implemented to police the planet, is not a poetic metaphor. It is a structural contradiction — one that the archive keeps open, rather than resolves.
One of the first clouds captured was viewed on January 18th in the winter of 2017 in Madrid. From that moment, the International Cloud Archive began to imagine another kind of ground — one that is not tied to national territories or the geopolitical logic that frames every image from above. Each cloud in the archive was recorded from a specific point on Earth, inevitably within some jurisdiction, yet the image itself erases this attachment. No one can say where it is from. No one can own the cloud that is captured. The clouds inhabit a realm of shifting, unfixable appearances — a space that resists the cartographic impulse to turn the atmosphere into an extension of the ground.
Alongside the collecting, I began an indefinite series of reports, From The Clouds To Me And Back Again, reflecting on each encounter as both a document and a refusal of geographic claim. What emerges is less a repository of stable facts than an ongoing disturbance of the urge to pin the sky to the ground.
This work inquires into what I call the “archiving condition” — the impossibility of holding the whole at once. The archive is never a complete view; it is a set of fragments whose positions, visibility, and meaning shift endlessly. In International Cloud Archive No. 1, materiality, time-volume, and geographical vagueness become the very evidence of the real — not as proof of ownership or control, but as a record of what resists mapping. The clouds remain, as they have always been, ungovernable.
"I condense, therefore
I am" (proclaims the cloud)
