Biography

Paula Veidenbauma is a theatre-maker and visual artist based in Vienna, Austria. Her practice engages with project(ed) dramaturies, the limits of flexibility, speculation, conspiracy readings, casual occultism, and expanded notions of renovation. She often works with spatial enigmas, fictional frictions, and investigative approaches across interconnected geographical contexts, drawing on rumour and ingrained mythologies.

With an academic background in Urban Studies and Film and Theatre Theory, she explores how discussions related to contemporary urbanism can be framed through theatrical language, experimenting with forms of spectacle that move between fact and fiction.

Artistic project

Cloud Mechanics explores how clouds are imagined, engineered and speculated upon in alpine regions experiencing rapid climate change. In many mountain valleys, rising temperatures intensify low-level inversions, creating stuck clouds and persistent fog. These conditions trap moisture, pollution and heat in the valleys, while the higher peaks, rising above the cloud layer, become increasingly dry. The growing imbalance is also leading to controversial experiments with cloud-modulation technologies such as cloud seeding. Clouds are no longer seen only as natural weather phenomena but are increasingly treated as speculative assets that can be managed, redirected or exploited.

At the same time, cloud manipulation technologies are gaining geopolitical significance. Clouds are shifting from entities we observe in order to understand the weather to instruments that can be engineered and potentially controlled. The project examines this ambivalent condition of ownership, in which clouds exist between elemental forces and tools of influence.

Embedded in situ within alpine settings, particularly at the level of low-altitude inversions, the movement research project examines cloud manipulation devices and mythologies through choreographic gestures derived from a critical engagement with climate modulation technologies.

Format: performance

Size of audience: 1 to 100 people

Specific location: alpine valleys and other cloudy gaps

Timing/duration: 25 to 40 minutes