Jorge da Cruz
my integration docs
Diana+ (Lomography), 120 Medium Format Film, 6×6
A Poetic Geography of Memory
All began with a single photograph—snapped in front of a gelateria in Barcelona during a brief holiday. It was a pause from the weight of transition, and a moment that unexpectedly set the tone for the entire project. The image is unassuming, casual, and quietly insistent. Like much of the series, it was captured with a DIANA+ plastic camera—grainy, warped, and deeply human. The imperfections are not distractions; they are the point. These are not carefully composed scenes but fragments—seconds held loosely in the frame.
What unfolds is less a record than a resonance. Memory here is not linear or illustrative, but ambient—tactile, interrupted, and emotionally charged. The photographs and accompanying works operate as visual annotations to an inner landscape shaped by dislocation and quiet resilience. Da Cruz pairs these images with drawings and paper-based compositions that blur the line between image and language. Each piece is provisional, intimate, and deliberately unresolved. They don’t narrate; they murmur.
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 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.
As the work evolved, so too did its context. The rise of far-right sentiment across Europe casts a long, ambient shadow. While never overtly polemical, Integration Documents carries the weight of this atmosphere. It asks what it means to belong in a time of division—and whether memory can be a form of quiet resistance.
The series includes 20 paper works that act as emotional interludes—part sketch, part journal, part unfinished thought. They refuse narrative closure and instead offer companionship: artifacts of presence that honor ambiguity and fragility.
Integration Documents is not bound to a single place or moment. It lives in the in-between—between languages, borders, identities. It is a study in stillness and movement, in the traces we carry, and the ones we leave behind.
