May 13, 2026, 10 am – 2 pm
Many thanks to the artist, writer and scholar Luiza Prado for her lecture THE GATHERING STORM – On Digital Infrastructures, Colonial Continuities, and the Politics and Poetics of the Cloud and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program Art Residency at BAI.
“The Cloud is often presented as weightless—a frictionless, borderless space of connection and convenience, responsible for mediating so many spheres of contemporary life. Yet, beneath this ethereal surface lies a dense architecture of extraction, surveillance, and colonial power; an opaque system that extends its reach from the depths of the Earth to the boundaries of the atmosphere. This lecture proposes the concept of the Regime of the Cloud: a techno-ecological system through which digital infrastructures reproduce and extend histories of dispossession, producing harm across bodies, landscapes, and cosmologies—in ways rarely made visible from the viewpoint of the Global North.
Moving through three elemental threads—Earth, Water, and Air—this lecture follows minerals torn from Indigenous territories, cables tracing the outlines of transatlantic slave routes, drones and algorithms governing life and death. It also attends to the edges and fissures of this regime: spiritual practices unexpectedly woven into Big Tech infrastructures, routing consultations with the ancestors through an AWS server; beach vendors navigating economic precarity through a sovereign payment system, emerging from the margins of global finance; communities reappropriating the tools of extraction toward care and survival.
Field research, storytelling, and theoretical inquiry weave together into a meditation on what it means to live inside the infrastructures that organize our worlds. The lecture is accompanied by a presentation of new artistic work in progress that translates this research into material and poetic form, tracing the Cloud’s reach across satellite imagery, extracted minerals, and the rendering of meaning and belonging into data.” (Text courtesy of Luiza Prado)
Luiza Prado (Brazil/Germany) is an artist, writer and scholar working between installation, sculpture, text, and image. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between plants, political infrastructures, and technology, and questions what processes are needed for collective concerns of environmental care and reproductive justice. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has spoken and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt among others.
More information on the Luiza Prado Website.
