My Integration Documents: In a city shaped by its latitude and mood, Jorge Da Cruz has found a terrain that mirrors the layered qualities of his work. Berlin—its stark winters, clouded skies, and ephemeral light—forms the atmospheric backdrop to “My Integration Documents”: A Poetic Geography of Memory, 2017, a project that moves between autobiography, political reflection, and visual poetry.
Da Cruz arrived in Berlin during one of those dark, heavy seasons, when sunlight rarely breaks through the dense cover of clouds. He had come from Lisbon, departing from the Lisbon harbor. But rather than resist the gloom of his new surroundings, he absorbed it. The city’s quiet greyness, its slow rhythm, and its fragmented transitions between seasons became central to his artistic language.
Integration Documents was created primarily through photography, using a Lomo, a Diana++, and several instant cameras. These tools, with their distinctive textures and imperfections, echo the project’s themes of memory, impermanence, and emotional geography. Berlin’s climate, with its sharp shifts and subdued light, doesn’t merely frame the work—it shapes it.
Decomposition Documents begins with a personal memory: a photograph taken in front of a gelateria in Barcelona, where the first ideas for the project began to form. This was Da Cruz’s first holiday after moving to Berlin—a moment of pause that allowed him to look back on his early days in a new country. The image, like many in the series, is casual, imperfect, and full of presence. Shot with a low-cost DIANA+ plastic camera, the photographs carry a soft distortion—grainy, tender, and unscripted. They capture seconds, not scenes.
What emerges is a visual essay on memory—its fragility, its interruptions, its permanence. The photographs and drawings in the series do not illustrate; they evoke. They function as visual footnotes to a broader narrative about migration, belonging, and the slow accumulation of personal and political weight.
In recent years, Da Cruz’s reflections have become increasingly shaped by the social and ideological tensions of our time. As far-right movements gain momentum across Europe, the emotional and psychological dimensions of integration—already complex—take on new layers. “
My Integration Documents” is not a direct political statement, but it carries within it the silent pressure of these realities. It suggests that memory and place are never neutral—that even the smallest moment is shaped by the world around it. This work also includes 20 paper works—objects that merge image and text, fragment and thought. They do not seek to explain but to accompany. Loosely structured, they resist narrative closure. Each piece feels like a private note made public, inviting the viewer to sit with uncertainty, with longing, with things unfinished.
At its core, “My Integration Documents” is not only about Berlin, nor solely about Da Cruz’s personal story. It is about the spaces between—between countries, languages, moods, and selves. It is a portrait of movement and stillness, of what we remember, and of what refuses to fade.
Berna Valada, Lisbon 2017
