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jeftavarwijk at gmail dot com
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In To Caress a Cloud, I construct clouds in the forest and film them at 500 frames per second using a decades-old 16mm camera, combining the footage with sound and voice to shape an immersive cinematic loop. The work unfolds as a meditative, sensuous experience—an invitation to feel, rather than resolve, the instability of perception. To experience uncertainty not as a vice, but to embrace its beauty.
To Caress a Cloud is an Expanded Cinema piece in development, and grounded in the science of perception with support provided by Utrecht University’s AttentionLab, run by professor Stefan van der Stigchel.
A cloud, too, resists its outline. Drifting, dissolving, reforming, it flickers between presence and absence.
This instability is not only of waves or clouds, but of perception itself. Neuroscience tells us (through Predictive Processing) that what we see, hear, and feel is not a direct mirror of the world, but our brain's best guess. Perception is expectation meeting sensation, shaped by memory, attention, and uncertainty. To perceive a cloud is to surf uncertainty, to live in approximation.
But there is also the human weight of it: to know that everything we love, every face, every touch, every held breath, it will one day disappear. To live in this impermanence, while knowing we never even perceive things as they "truly are," only as shimmering approximations.
The work asks: how do we stay with this fragility? How do we hold what cannot be held?
The clouds, slowed down by the camera and layered onto and next to eachother, stretch into a seamless 24-minute loop, endless in its dissolves.
Voices echo fragments of Mahler, stretched until they resemble breath, or mourning. Birdsong bends in and out of time. Bells dissolve into rain. The viewer is held in a space where perception never settles, where every edge blurs into another, clarity never quite in reach.
A chair is chair until it breaks. A wave is wave until it is foam. A love is love until it fades, though no single moment can be named as its end. Everything emerges, shifts, dissolves; thick with becoming, thin at the edges.
In close dialogue with professor Stefan van der Stigchel and his team of researchers from Utrecht University, the installation grounds its poetic gestures in the science of attention and predictive processing.
This work does not resolve these questions, but invites the spectator to inhabit them. To feel, not define. To notice the instability of perception, the trembling edges of things. To dwell in the moment a cloud forms, dissolves, and becomes a cloud again.
Installation-view, prototype viewing september 2025
What if you could caress a cloud
Wave your hand softly,
though its white, milky skin
Stick your arm deep inside,
finds its organs
The heart of a cloud,
is shrouded in unknowing
The deeper you get
The more you get it
The more it gets you
Inside there,
are no sides
Just this
Inner mist
You miss
You
Nothing amiss
Just this
All there is
Created by Jefta Varwijk
Produced by Chris de Krijger, Nienke Huitenga, Jefta Varwijk, There Will Be Film, Studio ZZZap
Cloudmaker by Daniel de Bruin
Camera support by Etkon, Edwin Schouten
Film development and scan by Haghefilm
Nederlands Filmfonds
KFHein fonds
Fentener van Vlissingen fonds
Kees Eijrond Fonds
Gemeente Utrecht Cultuurfonds
Vevam steunfonds