“Two thousand five hundred years ago, a man ordered the sea to be whipped.” Thus begins Cloud Catchers, a story narrated by a female voice. The narrative unfolds as a tapestry of ancient myths recounting humanity’s precarious relationship with water—from violent floods to persistent droughts, often personified by female figures. Woven into these legends are fragments of conversations with scientists, researchers, and climate psychologists, bringing the complexity of the present into focus and exploring the challenge of finding words and narratives capable of giving voice to the water crisis and its inequalities.

Ingrid Hora’s research stems from an imaginary inspired by fog fences, a recently developed soft technology for collecting water from the air, currently being tested in different parts of the world, including Barcelona and the Anti-Atlas mountain range in Morocco.

The research materialized as a three-channel video installation modeled on this technology and enriched by sculptural interventions that expand Hora’s work through forms and representations of vessels used to condense and contain water: Dragon Trees, ocarinas, and vessels with different physiognomies evoke continuity and communication between bodies.

The moving images, filmed by the artist across the Mediterranean Sea, are edited according to a high-intensity choreography, following a rhythm dictated by the incessant flow of videos found and collected on social media and scientific platforms. Drawing on humanity’s ancestral efforts to control water—across oceans, mountains, and skies—Cloud Catchers attempts to grasp a collective present marked by anxiety and extremity, tracing the contours of a narrative that can only be polyphonic.

Cloud Catchers was promoted by BAR project in collaboration with Hangar (Barcelona) and Eurac Research (Bolzano), with the support of the Dar Bellarj Foundation (Marrakech).