Meta-Curation in the Cultural Sphere

In today’s digital landscape, images circulate through algorithms and metadata, often detached from their original cultural context. Rather than being curated through intentional frameworks, they appear in endless search results. They are flattened, reordered and reclassified by invisible systems of digital organisation.
Hui Baquero explores how meaning can be reconstructed from such fragmented digital archives. Through a publication centred on the image of the cloud, she proposes a methodology for reassembling cultural narratives using associative rather than hierarchical logic. By extracting cloud-related imagery from institutional databases, Hui examines how digital systems obscure or reshape meaning. The project critiques the prioritisation of searchability over significance, offering ‘meta-curation’ as an alternative approach.
The result is both a study and a provocation: What happens when we restore narrative to the database — when images are connected not by tags, but by resonance?