Essay Daniela Bousso, 05/2007

From Photographic Image to Image in Motion: Rosângela

The oeuvre of Rosângela Rennó integrates a contemporary hub of artistic action that operates relations of transit and simultaneity in collective and collaborative spaces, putting the clichés of globalized society in check. The artist creates a metaphor for our times through the creation of multiple meanings, and ceaselessly activates audience participation.

Her work, which can be linked to the notion of liquid modernity as formulated by Zygmunt Bauman,* features a sociopolitical tinge with a feel of denunciation—without claiming to be a spokesperson for difference—and provokes friction, in an immediate reaction to our liquid, fluid condition. As Bauman would put it, “liquid” is a concept that defines opposition to the notion of fixedness and weight of modernity. The change in our notion of space and time owes itself to a circumstance of superimposition and instability, which has taken place since the early 20th century, and which has become more intense in the turn of the millennium. In present days, we are facing a universal transit situation, consecutively made of acceleration and amnesia, and which promotes the erasure of memory.

The issue of “forgetfulness and amnesia” has been a privileged focus of discussion in the field of art with the advent of globalization in the planet. The use of games alternating between fictional and real produces what we currently call “documental mode” in art, found in the work of artists such as Walid Raad, young Alice Miceli, and others, as well as Rennó herself. It is pertinent, then, to ask how this artist has enhanced this discussion.

I would say that the work of Rennó is a “living archive” of sorts. Archive as in the source of memory recovery, for the construction of history and as a strategy for fighting amnesia. Here, I take the risk of not lingering on a description of her work—which unfolds into more than twenty years of archives, collections, libraries, diaries, archives, and videos, based on photographs, installations, films, and objects—to try and enter her pathway to image.

It seems certain that her interest is not limited only to the field of photography, so much so that it was difficult to name her activity. If we were to ask her whether she was a photographer, she would quickly dodge the classification; she claimed to be an artist, and she would set her own attitude apart from that of traditional photographers. I believe that Rennó’s commitment is toward the pathway of image, and that she travels a path that leads from photography to image in motion, reaching the cinematic experience and updating it by means of that which we now call Transcinemas, or cinemas of the future.

According to Kátia Maciel, who coined the term along with André Parente, Transcinema is “cinema as interface, i.e., as a surface that we can go through” … “The invention of tridimensional space in Renaissance, the breaking of this space by modernity, and the creation of the contemporary space of immersion indicate the motion of this idea through time” … “if we consider how, in Brazil, neoconcretism problematizes the breaking of the frame and the spatialization of painting, we clarify a process that results in the inclusion of the viewer in the work” … “the variety of forms which we call Transcinemas produces an image—a relationship that is built based on an observer implied in his/her reception process. It is up to this viewer-cum-participant to articulate the proposed elements, and in this relationship a possible model of situation to be lived is established” … “it is not the artist who defines what is the work, neither is it the person involved, but rather it is the relationship between these terms that institutes the sensitive form. It is this relationship cinema, created out of situations of light and motion in hybrid surfaces, that we call Transcinema.”**

The work of Rennó is located in the field of displacements and of expanded territories, of the designs and paths which, if not pertaining to the discussion of means or media, occupy nonspecific places, interstitial, indeterminate spaces, in which the viewer, as proposed by Oiticica, becomes a participant in the work. Whatever the medium in which it operates, from photographic collectionism to video installations to experiments with film, the degree of completeness of the work will depend on the relationship of alterity, of an “other” coauthor, of mental-imagetic triggering, for the work to accomplish its task and reach its maximum poetics, which is a glimpse of the destiny of images.

This entails operating in such a level of tension that it changes the destiny of the images found in family albums collected in antique stores, and in prison archives. The objective is to appropriate, displace, and resignify them, based on an action of intervention by the artist, which entails the reintervention of the “other.” Behind what appears to be an obsession for collecting and archiving, there appears a constant presence of the ultimate driving force in her career: the narrative. It metamorphoses itself into everything, from photography to the more recent experiments with film. What is interesting is the reaction elicited in observers’ perceptions when they are in touch with her work.

By creating new narratives that give birth to cinematic imagery, the work of Rennó reaches us in our bodily dimension, a heritage of minimalism and of the very path traveled by installations in art from the 1990s onwards. That was when cinema evolved into interactivity, configuring the notion of a Transcinema. The emphasis placed on the evolution of cinema—characterized, since the 1960s, by the movement of expanded cinema linked to experimentalism, which changed the classic condition of film reception: film and audience/passive reception—became clear in Experiência de cinema.

In that work, four sequences of alternating images appear and disappear. Images are projected onto a curtain of dry-ice smoke, culled from archival photos organized into four filmic sequences that last eight seconds. The installation features the spatiality of video installations, but the ephemeral materiality of the projected images in motion creates a sort of volatile screen. The smoke curtain evokes the phantasmagoric condition of magic lanterns from the 17th century, and harks back to the origins of cinema history.

Oddly, Rennó works with four film genres in those sequences: love, family, war movies, and thrillers, each with thirty-one photographs. The fictional game between love and death remains as part of her work, along with the narrative. It is intriguing to notice how these four genres come off as clichés for the crisis in the contemporary world. Is there anything more scary and, after all, more recurrent than the notion of death and the impossibility of romantic love, of family relations, or group relations in liquid modernity?

According to Bauman, the patterns of liquefaction have now moved from the political field to that of private life, and the ties of dependence and interaction are being systematically denied, precisely so that they do not retain their shapes for too long: everything tends to fall apart and become fluid. Everything that is fluid trickles down, becomes diluted, escapes us, but does not compromise us either. As for the clichés of war and violence, even though they are presented in the form of surveillance and punishment, is not Rennó ultimately discussing oppression? With each sequence that vanishes in smoke, are we not being faced with the inevitable escape, the inexorable evanescence of everything that concerns us in present times?

The appearance and disappearance of cinematic sequences place the audience in a unique type of experience, where intermittence and interruption, in addition to giving viewers a feeling of facing the fugacious, that which escapes with no possibility of one’s intervention, also makes them deal with a moment of suspension and oddness. This is where the artist operates an extremely sophisticated mechanism in the game of perception. The time span between sequences brings a feeling of erasure, of losing something that remains in a subliminal level; we are suddenly faced with the intangible and indescribable, hence the cruelty of this form of oppression: when we sense that we are going to lose something, or that this something is going to become erased and lost in the time tunnel, that is when we want to retain that something, before we can even grasp it or touch it.

In Experiência de cinema, it is not the amnesia per se that haunts us, but rather the impossibility of stopping it, its irreversibility. Not to mention the innovative character of experimenting with another way of making cinema, this expanded cinema or Transcinema, which had been sought after ever since surrealism, including the experimental cinema of the 1960s, and finally the relationship of interactivity with participants during the decades of 1990 and 2000.

Apart from all of this, Rennó also creates a situation of suspension and suspense reminiscent of films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty, by Luis Buñuel, where the dissociation between facts and realities gives us the feeling that we have to put a puzzle together in order to reestablish the whole. The suspension of temporalities in Experiência de cinema does not allow us to elaborate the narrative, and the angst of yearning for another sequence creates, in the interval, a feeling of desolation and solitude. Once again at play, now backwards, is the fight against erasure and amnesia, one of the key features of this artist’s poetics.

By the way, I go so far as to think that the archives, libraries, collections, albums, the “trouvé” characters of Rosângela Rennó are on their way, for over two decades, to becoming part of a large, albeit deconstructed narrative. Her path with regard to image is not restricted to the poetic condition; there is a formal investigation that resulted in the experience of image in motion. The “living archive” of Rennó is more than a transgenerational testimony, because its experiments are centered on the interactivity and the sensory power of image-relation. “Já é” (literally “it already is”), as the Rio de Janeiro slang goes. It always has been, and already is, Transcinema.

Daniela Bousso holds a doctorate in visual arts, communication, and semiotics. She is the director of Paço das Artes, in São Paulo, since 1997, and curates the Sergio Motta Award for electronic art, which she established in 2000. Some of the highlights in her work as a curator are the exhibitions Excesso (1996), Arte e Tecnologia (1998), Por que Duchamp? (1999-2000), Metacorpos (2003), and Ocupação (2005), all held at the Paço das Artes, São Paulo; the Denis Oppenheim and Tony Oursler Halls, at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998); the Rafael França Special Hall at the Mercosur Biennial (2001), in Porto Alegre; and the 3rd Biennial Parallel Exhibition (2006), in São Paulo. Her articles were published in art magazines, and she edited the books Artur Barrio: a metáfora dos fluxos 2000/1968, and Intimidade, for Paço das Artes. She specializes in public policy planning and strategy for contemporary art and art technology, and organized the 1st International Contemporary Art Symposium Padrões aos pedaços, o pensamento contemporâneo na arte, held at Paço das Artes (2005).

* BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Modernidade líquida, Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Editor, 2000.

** MACIEL, Kátia. “Transcinema e a estética da interrupção em limiares da imagem,” Antonio Fatorelli and Fernando Bruno, (orgs.), Rio de Janeiro, Maud, 2006.

Interview Paula Alzugaray, 05/2007

I would like to talk about a set of works in which you explore newspaper texts. Displaced into the body of your work, those texts function as brief narratives of anonymous existences. What alterities are those that hide behind abbreviated names?

Humanity. Those texts belong in Arquivo universal. The idea of eliminating any reference whatsoever to a specific image or person from a text, making it ambiguous enough that you are able to imagine that it is about many different persons, situations, countries, or eras, aims at approximating the effect that photography provokes. A photograph does not have a name and it does not have a date, unless you photograph some data that place you in time and space. The idea was to gamble with the possibility of projecting onto text the character that you wanted to. And that alterity can be your own self. You can project your own self. It is very similar to the way in which I use image, removing its contrast, or creating an intentional opacity in order to make the photo less legible.

Everything seems to contribute to provide legitimacy to a question contained in the Espelho diário [Daily mirror] video installation: “Is it not true that every news story is about our own selves?”

I guess so. But there is another aspect that interests me, and which complements this notion. The official story, as told in books, is often very masculine. It is the story of heroes—despite the fact that the Brazilian history is full of funny, or not-so-heroic moments. But what I really enjoy is telling small stories, which can happen to anyone. The small accounts of the oppressed, of the defeated, of those who have no say. The story of the defeated is more interesting.

Those newspaper texts, manipulated in Espelho diário and other installations, such as In Iblivionem or Hipocampo, seem to loose a lot of their “journalistic objectivity,” and gain an aura of fantasy that brings them closer to the narratives described by Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller. It is as if the original news story had set itself loose, and moved toward other contents.

But manipulation of texts is minimal. They only undergo a few cuts, through which I eliminate the references that do not interest me: geographic, temporal, and related to identity. This feeling of openness that you get, I guess it is due to the fact that the fragment is decontextualized from the full text.

Are those small omissions sufficient to remove the informative character from the text, and turn it into fiction?

I can no longer see the distance between fiction and reality in those texts. I probably have close to ten texts about torture during the dictatorship, but it is much easier to imagine all of them as being fiction than reality. I think this potential is contained in the text. All I do is find a way for it to become even more enigmatic than it already is.

Getting back to Walter Benjamin, who claimed that narrative is “an artisanal approach to communication,” generated synchronously with the manual work of artisans, to what extent is your relation with photo and text archives characterized by “modeling”?

I have always enjoyed this possibility of open images. Of making them sufficiently ambiguous, so you can project yourself and interact with them in a very direct way. Opening the image so that you can identify yourself, rather than trying to associate it with another character.

In Bibliotheca there is another narrator, different from the one in Arquivo universal. He appears in the archive of files that describe the albums locked inside glass panels. Instead of just describing the images, he seems to interpret the story of the character portrayed. What is the feature that distinguishes this narrator from the previous ones?

He deduces the story based on the reading of the albums, but you cannot be certain of the images contained inside. There is no guarantee that what the librarian wrote is true. The narrator is a librarian who might have lied to you. You must believe him, as you must believe the narrators, and as you must believe journalists as well: you must believe that the news story is being told correctly. But here, maybe there is more of a desire for organizing, for keeping. The narratives contained in the albums are not accessible. Thus, it seems to me that a narrator does not exist here. What does exist is a librarian, who is much more concerned with keeping or saving a vestige of something. But it is all incomplete and fragmented, the data are fragile. This is the delirium I created for this librarian. What degree of veracity can you ascribe to a story made out of fragments? If I am speculating about the motivations for the guy to make fifty images and leave only ten, then I am making fiction.

The empty spaces and gaps in the narratives in Bibliotheca reflect the blanks and the discontinuity of memory. You have yet another “blank” work, the Vera Cruz video, in which a historic narrative chases after a blank film. What is the connection between the blank spaces in the portrait albums and this video?

In Vera Cruz, there is a text very well backed up by a document, which is probably the most well known, most important document in Brazil. But all we have are those textual accounts. What I liked was precisely to work with all that could not be documented. When you read the letter, what can you imagine about the relationship of the Portuguese with the Indians? There are very few elements for that. You only have the version of the Portuguese, you do not have the version of the other side. It is the vision of the colonizer.

Does the whiteness in the image symbolize the absence of the other side of the story? Does it indicate the fragility of the colonizer’s account?

Yes, and also an excess of judgment, based on a very fleeting contact. It indicates the lack of the counterpart of a judgment, for instance, that the Indians had no taste, just because they did not like the wine and dried fruits that they were served on the boat. If it were completely judgment-free, perhaps it would be a more interesting text. But I do not know whether it would be possible to have a fully descriptive text.

I see a certain degree of similarity between Vera Cruz and Congo, made by Arthur Omar, in 1972. In the film, action is replaced with phrases and letterings over a white background. The text functions as a script of sorts for an action that has not been recorded. And in Vera Cruz, the blank appears in order to question the text.

I am not acquainted with Congo but, in Vera Cruz, the subtitles exist precisely in order to be questioned. That conversation is fictional, created based on data from the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha. We know that the conversation between Indians and the Portuguese did not take place. Therefore, the work presents several impossibilities, which you call “blanks.” It contains an impossible recording, an impossible conversation. The Portuguese man speaks, but there is no reply, because the reply was not understood. The other is seen and judged from a single point of view.

The blank is the absence of the other. What happens is an antidocumentary of sorts, because the “other,” so often evoked in documentaries, is not present here.

In documentaries, the other has a voice, the other answers. In those days, the only possible account was the textual one, or the drawings. Thus, you must count only on the version of he who is presenting that which you must believe are the facts.

But the absence of the other can also occur in a documentary that contains image, depending on how that information is edited.

You are right. And Bibliotheca also features some of that manipulation of information, as it renders you unable to see the album itself, and presents you with a sort of summary of the content. Everything is incomplete, and I only show that which is interesting to me. And you need to believe it. Whether I am lying or not, you will never know. This comes from the realization I had by visiting museums throughout the world, and seeing how they prepare their monitored visits, the thematic exhibitions, in which you put on a headphone, you shorten your sight, and you are led to look at that object based on previous indications. So that you see exactly what the museum wants you to see. People seek guided visits, believing that they will acquire more information and knowledge. And this is why I wanted to put the photographic image of the album cover in the glass panel, offering the public only a representation of that object.

In Espelho diário you play a stunning variety of women, with a single common feature: their name. Is this a way of eliminating the other, of devouring the other?

I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe the one who disappeared there was me, right? Well, the only reason why I did not disappear altogether, is because I am no actress to play the homeless, the socialite, the dead woman. I do not have that ability, I wish I did, I should have practiced a little more... But after all, I like the fact that I did not become so enmeshed, that I kept a minimum distance. But I do not know if to mirror is the same as to cannibalize.

Does the mirror created there keep the distances between the alterities of those Rosângelas?

That is how I see it. But there are several mirrorings within that work. I tried to not fully take the place of the other, but I cannot position myself as a narrator either. The mirror implies in a duality. And it speaks of two sides that resemble each other. On the one hand, all of my homonymous women; on the other hand, me.

Comment biography Paula Alzugaray, 05/2007

In discussions about Rosângela Rennó, a sentence repeats itself: “The photographer who does not photograph.” But it has not always been, and it not always is that way. The artist became recognized in that sentence from the moment when she decided to stop making photographs, replacing the photographic act with the appropriation of existing images. This took place in the mid-1980s, when she still lived in Belo Horizonte, and started working with images found in photograph albums. This first archaeological impulse gave birth to the series Pequena ecologia da imagem, in which she turned her eye to images with low resolution and legibility, portraying obscured, veiled, out-of-focus, or only suggested figures. Mulheres iluminadas (1988) and A mulher que perdeu a memória (1988), among other images, was a harbinger of the investigation that Rosângela Rennó would engage in throughout the following decades, about memory, identity, and their erasure.

Until this day, Rennó acknowledges herself to be very economic when it comes to taking photographs, and says she records only what she thinks is worth keeping, “almost always the marks of human presence in the world.” Instead of photographing, collecting. Her interest in discarded images and her habit of collecting (albums, photos, texts, etc.) were key to the formation of her work strategies. Her first major “findings” occurred in 1988, when, upon starting a graduate course in cinema, at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo (USP), she developed a series of photographs based on photograms thrown in the garbage cans near the cutting rooms. Shortly thereafter, when she moved to Rio de Janeiro, she began to go over the old 3x4 photo studios downtown, recovering dead files of negatives and forgotten copies. The collection would lead to a blunt reflection on the social value and symbolic power of photography, expressed in installation work such as Duas lições de realismo fantástico (1991), the series A identidade em jogo (1991), Atentado ao poder (1992), and Imemorial (1994). Regarded as one of the first Brazilian female artists to displace photography out of the bidimensional field and into the territory of artistic installation, Rosângela Rennó would soon become a reference in any discussion about the expansion of photographic image.

Furthermore, all of her archival image reprocessing series were seminal to the concepts of contaminated photography and appropriation photography, which emerged in the early 1990s. The curator of the exhibition Fotografia contaminada (Centro Cultural São Paulo, 1994), critic Tadeu Chiarelli would publish a text in the magazine Lapiz: Revista Internacional de Arte, in July/September 1997, crediting the visibility of Rosângela Rennó’s work for the “international coming of age” of Brazilian photography.* The artist ranks among the most internationally acclaimed Brazilian artists, with works featured in the collections of institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, among others.

The expansion of image, in Rennó’s work, reached new heights of complexity, beginning with her work using newspaper texts that made mention to photography. The various series that comprise the project in progress Arquivo universal (ongoing since 1992) feature texts used and manipulated like photographs. The criteria for selecting and editing the texts are the same ones applied for photographs. As with images, the manipulation of text aims at eliminating specificities and references to space-time. In an interview to critic and curator Paulo Herkenhoff, Rennó said that, under the guidance of Professor Eduardo Peñuela, at USP, “there was a heightening of her desire to work with intertextual games. That was where her interest in text as a replacement for image emerged.”**

Just as her interest in visual intertextuality was already present in her formative years, her experiments with cinema are also a condition inherent in her work. Even though her video work would only come about further on, beginning with Vera Cruz (2000) and Espelho diário (2001), the issues related to image in motion that arose in her cinema classes were immediately incorporated into Rennó’s artistic research.

Those issues already appeared in one of her first solo exhibitions, Anti-cinema, held at the Galeria Corpo, in Belo Horizonte, in 1989. Some of the work in the exhibition paid tribute to Muybridge and Etiene-Jules Marey, founding fathers of sequential photography, and to artists Marcel Duchamp and Jan Dibbets. They were a series of photographs mounted on vinyl records, which should be “spun” on old record players. Other works established a direct dialogue with the raw material of cinema: a series of large-format photographs, made from cinema photograms found in garbage cans at ECA-USP. Another object, Detector de primaveras (1989), built using an old bulb flash, spun and flashed on a pedestal, completing her reflection about the conversation between the visual arts, photography, and cinema.

Two years later, Lição de realismo fantástico (1991), her first experiment with projection of moving images, consisted of an installation with two pedestals from which phantasmagoric images emerged, projected onto the wall, continually spinning. The device evoked a very old system for producing “phantasmagoria,” common in the rotating magic lanterns of the 18th century.

The artist’s fascination with gadgets and kinetic devices was further reinforced with Experiência de cinema (2004), which is based on a device for projecting images onto smoke. Once again evoking the disappearance of image, this work articulates the same concept that led Rosângela Rennó to quit taking photographs: a criticism of the continuous flow of image production and consumption, which leads to an inevitable selective mechanism of memory, ultimately causing social amnesia.

* Tadeu Chiarelli in “Fotografia no Brasil: anos 90,” text reproduced in the book Arte internacional brasileira, published by Lemos Editorial, São Paulo, 1999.

** Account reproduced in “Rennó ou a beleza e o dulçor do presente,” a text written by Paulo Herkenhoff, featured in the book Rosângela Rennó, published by Edusp/Imprensa Oficial, São Paulo, 1998.

Bibliographical references 05/2007

Arquivos do mal
Arquivos do mal/ Mal de arquivo is an essay by Maria Angélica Melendi, a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, about the work Cicatriz, made with negatives found in the State Penitentiary. Melendi also wrote the text in the book Rosângela Rennó: O arquivo universal e outros arquivos, published by Cosac & Naify in 2003.

Galeria Vermelho
The Web site of Galeria Vermelho includes the artist’s résumé, images of her work, a bibliography, and the essay written by Lisette Lagnado, Pequena e grande memória (sobre o trabalho de Rosângela Rennó). 

VB On-line
Synopses of the artist’s works featured in the Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival and in other Associação programmes.