Aquarium is an exploration of the unfolding consequences of a panic attack. It is a visual research on shattered perception – when sight is blurred, hearing is muffled, the body is frozen, and the heartbeat is racing. I landed in Beijing on the 23rd of August 2017. For the first time, I faced a severe panic attack. Sometimes you observe and sometimes you're being observed. It's almost like seeing through a glass that distorts what your eyes see, that makes the light flicker in front of you second after second and inserts you in a completely different world. And suddenly you are on the other side of that glass. You cannot hear what others say but you can feel the sweet cuddle of the water that surrounds you. Aquarium is the result of a quiet abandonment to self discovery.

A highly contested land between India and Pakistan since 1947, Kashmir is today one of the most militarized zones in the world.

The first war between the two countries emerged from the ashes of the British colonial kingdom saw, in 1949, the United Nations intervening with a resolution that was urging the need for a plebiscite where the inhabitants would decide whether to join India or Pakistan.

No referendum has been implemented ever since.

Since the 90’s, Kashmir has been witnessing various political uprising against the Indian administration and every time the population fought for Azadi (“freedom” in Urdulanguage), their struggle has been silenced with blood.

Despite of the unpredictable new season of protests, repression and martyrs, the situation has still not changed. Numerous human rights violations perpetrated by the Indian security forces have filled the heart of Kashmiri men and women with disillusionment and resentment.

“Monsoons never cross the mountains” is a visual journey through the struggle of the Kashmiri people trapped in an endless season of sorrow while waiting for the spring of Azadi. It is an attempt to depict the emotional landscape of the valley of Kashmir through the eyes of the children, entangled in this cycle from the very beginning of their life.

Inspired by the classification and arrangement of ancient art in traditional museums’ collections, I create my own catalogues of artefacts in a time that is in-between the present and the past, the historical and the fictional. By reconfiguring images from different sources, I populate these virtual pages with my own collection of surreal artefacts. The received view of ancient objects is deliberately distorted.

The work aims to question the very idea that culture can be contained by national boundaries and institutions, revealing instead an entity in constant flux, subject to transformative processes of migration and exchange. Some archival images are presented untouched, while others are dismembered or combined with new limbs or partners. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragment; presented as floating entities they belong to neither specific time or museum.

My source here is the digital collection of the Smithsonian Institution archives and the existing archival imagery function as a background where I add or remove elements from it. Sometimes I digitally erase all of the details so that I can insert new ones. The pre-existing images were glass negatives depicting historical findings, chronologically numbered from 1 to 5,075. My intervention aims to distort the original information by fabricating a new document in which real data of the artefacts are combined with new visual information.

Are They Rocks or Clouds? is a multifaceted photographic project that is based on the hypothese of the occurrence of a huge hydrogeological catastrophe in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy. Facing this idea Caneve was not moved by a necessity to document any catastrophe in its occurrence, either to celebrate the beauty of the mountains’ environment.

Hydrogeological risk for the mountains, such as climate crisis elsewhere, has become a prominent issue, which one can hardly imagine if not after something catastrophic happens. Therefore Marina Caneve builds a scenario for an environmental catastrophe to happen, through blending her research and archival footages, texts, and her own photographs. Caneve also questions the structure of our knowledge on mountainous areas which could benefits greatly if we allow different perspectives: from historical material, technical knowledge, an anthropological vision and of the inhabitants of the area themselves.

The project lacks a straight narrative, its layout (in the book or in exhibitions) constantly introduces deviations – used as a metaphor of the layering of rocks which constitutes the inner structure of mountains, thus showcasing their vulnerability.

‘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 lim-its of how we interact with the natural world.

(Lesley A. Martin, The Dummy Photobook Prize, Cortona On The Move, 2018)