Jorge da Cruz

Integration Documents — A Poetic Geography of Memory, 2014

Diana+ / Lomography
120 medium format film, 6 × 6

Text by noT

Integration Documents — A Poetic Geography of Memory is a photographic and mixed-media project developed by Jorge da Cruz in 2014. Bringing together analogue photography, instant images, drawings, and paper-based compositions, the series explores the relationship between memory, displacement, and the experience of adapting to a new cultural environment. Developed across Lisbon, Barcelona, and Berlin, the work approaches photography not as a systematic record of places or events, but as a way of collecting fragments of personal experience during a period of transition.

The project began with a photograph taken outside a gelateria in Barcelona during a short holiday. The image was an ordinary observation, made without a particular artistic intention, but it gradually became the starting point for a larger body of work. Its imperfect qualities, characteristic of the camera used to produce it, introduced an approach to photography in which technical limitations and unexpected results became part of the visual language.

Much of the series was photographed using a Diana+, a simple plastic camera associated with the Lomography movement and the use of medium-format film. Unlike equipment designed for technical precision, the Diana+ produces images that frequently contain variations in sharpness, uneven exposure, light leaks, and optical distortions. These characteristics are not necessarily predictable, making the final photograph partly dependent on conditions that escape the photographer's control.

For da Cruz, this unpredictability became an important aspect of the project. The photographs retain visible traces of the process through which they were made, allowing accidents and imperfections to contribute to their meaning. Their blurred contours, unstable colours, and irregular exposure introduce a relationship with the way memories are preserved and recalled: often incomplete, altered by time, and disconnected from the circumstances in which they originally occurred.

Although the work moves between different European cities, Integration Documents does not follow the structure of a conventional travel diary. Its photographs concentrate on fragments of everyday life: streets, interiors, people, objects, architectural surfaces, and moments that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Rather than documenting a journey through recognisable landmarks, the images register the experience of being present in unfamiliar surroundings and gradually developing a personal relationship with them.

Berlin occupies a particularly important place in the series. Following his move from Lisbon, da Cruz encountered a city with different climatic conditions, architectural characteristics, and social rhythms. The reduced daylight of northern winters, grey skies, and the particular atmosphere of Berlin's streets and buildings became recurring elements in the photographs. These observations contributed to a visual language shaped as much by the experience of arriving in a new place as by the physical appearance of the city itself.

The contrast between Lisbon and Berlin also introduces a geographical dimension to the work. Differences in light, climate, urban space, and everyday habits become part of a broader experience of relocation. Rather than treating these contrasts as fixed cultural identities, the series approaches them through individual observations and personal associations. The images document a gradual process of adaptation, in which unfamiliar surroundings begin to acquire meaning through repeated encounters.

The title Integration Documents introduces a reference to the administrative language associated with migration and settlement. Moving between countries often involves official procedures through which identity, residence, and belonging must be established or demonstrated. Da Cruz adopts this terminology but transfers it into a different context. The documents presented in the series are not administrative records, but photographs and visual fragments that register the less formal and often more complicated experience of becoming familiar with a new place.

In this sense, the project distinguishes between the legal or institutional understanding of integration and its personal dimensions. Official documents can establish a person's status within a country, but they cannot fully describe the experience of living there, developing relationships, or forming a sense of belonging. The photographs approach these questions indirectly, through ordinary situations whose significance emerges from their relationship to memory and personal experience.

The political climate of Europe during the period also forms part of the project's background. The growing visibility of far-right movements and increasingly restrictive discussions surrounding immigration, national identity, and borders introduced another dimension to questions of integration and belonging. Although Integration Documents does not operate as a direct political statement, these developments provide a wider context for its attention to displacement, identity, and the experience of living between different cultural environments.

Alongside the photographs, the series incorporates drawings, instant images, and paper-based works that extend its documentary character. These pieces function as visual notes, combining different materials and forms of representation without necessarily following a chronological sequence. Their unfinished or fragmentary appearance is consistent with the broader structure of the project, where individual images contribute to an evolving collection rather than a single, predetermined narrative.

The relationship between photography and memory is particularly important here. Photographs are often understood as evidence of events or places, but their meanings can change as they become separated from their original contexts. An image initially taken as a casual observation may later acquire significance through its association with a particular period of life. Integration Documents explores this transformation, allowing ordinary photographic fragments to become part of a personal archive shaped by distance and recollection.

The series also reflects an interest in the material qualities of analogue photography at a time when digital images had become increasingly dominant. The use of film introduces a delay between taking a photograph and seeing its result, while the physical negative and photographic print retain a tangible relationship with the process of image-making. These characteristics contribute to the project's attention to time, uncertainty, and the gradual construction of memory.

Integration Documents — A Poetic Geography of Memory brings together photography, personal experience, and observations of urban life to examine the process of adapting to unfamiliar surroundings. Its geographical references are specific, but the questions it raises extend beyond the individual cities represented. The project considers how places influence personal identity, how memories travel between different environments, and how the experience of relocation changes the relationship between past and present.

Rather than presenting integration as a completed process, da Cruz approaches it as something that develops through time, ordinary encounters, and the accumulation of small experiences. The photographs and accompanying works form an incomplete but personal record of this transition, preserving the relationship between the places left behind and those that gradually become familiar.

noT