Chill-Head

Eugenio Ampudia: Cada palabra es como una innecesaria mancha en el silencio y en la nada

Eugenio Ampudia
Cada palabra es como una innecesaria mancha en el silencio y en la nada
Matadero Madrid

Farmacia S. Cepeda

There is always something telling me when I'm home! It is so good...

Business Travel Show

Tramshed

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: Papagaio

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva
Papagaio
Camden Arts Centre

International Confex

Just another day in the UK!

WDWGN! (on Erasure)

© Rosângela Rennó, A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23], 2013

The film Snow White (2000), directed by João César Monteiro (1939-2003, Portugal), which is inspired by Robert Walser's (1878-1956, Switzerland) writings, consists on a Black screen with a densely composed audio track of dialogues and background noise that plays during the 75 minutes of the film runtime. When we have images, we don’t have the spoken word; when we have sound, we don’t have images. Cinematographic controversies and artistic correlations on the side, what does count here is more related with the spectators’ role and on the function of images in contemporary society, and its relation with the written and the spoken word. It is a short circuit on society’s fixation with visuals and that that connects us as visual humans beings, regardless of creed and convictions, on the narrative process that is expounded by images brought through by way of cinema, photography, and the visual arts in general. Why does a Black screen appeal to erasures of narratives that is brought about by systems of political imposition, such as are the historical interpretations conveyed from archives? But also to our selective memory, that human ability to remember some facts while apparently forgetting others, especially when those are inconvenient or embarrassing.

The use of images can encourage idol worship. Occidental society is based on idolatry of images since its inception. How about authority words, sentences, and texts? This is also an idolisation of an image. It just adds information rather than rethinking about the structure. “The words do not replace the images,” as is expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in The Emancipated Spectator, adding, “They are images … figures that substitute one image for another, words for visual forms or visual forms for words.” This transformation, a "short circuit" as Rancière would have put it, carries Snow White to the aesthetic regime from the representational regime. In other words, from those utopias and dystopias from a future that is already past to an unresolved act that opens possibilities.

The photographer’s book, “A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23]” (2013), is the second artist book out of a series of three[i], and tells the story about a clearing of the history it had registered and presented. It is a gathering of photographs, organised by the Brazilian photographer Rosângela Rennó (1962, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), from the photo albums with photographs that were taken by Augusto Malta and his two sons, between 1903 and the 1950s, and which registered the history of a particular landscape: images and written annotation about the people that inhabit Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, its buildings, roads, and the ambience that characterised what has made this place. Rennó’s book is a publication on images that systematically have been disappearing from society’s memory. Meaning that, presently, no registered testimony and visual evidence about what was portrayed can be used, the disappearance of photos and what the reference that has vanished only remaining the written annotations. Thus, beside from being a book reflecting on the construction of history, it is as well a book absorbing those systems used to establish contemporary interpretations and narratives, a book of copies of copies!

© Rosângela Rennó, A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23], 2013

On a representational regime “A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23]” is an artwork resulting from a research undertaken by Rosângela Rennó on the General Archive of Rio de Janeiro. It takes the form of a book consisting of photographs capturing the physical conditions of the pages from the few lasting albums of photographs (8 albums out of a total of 27) of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Twenty-seven albums that were part of the Colecção Pereira Passos and were registered, restored, and packed according to the rightful preservation conditions in that Brazilian institution. With this work (the title makes reference to the official records on the boxes containing Malta’s photographs and other loose documents), Rennó demonstrates the undetected vandalism, the scale of destruction and perpetuated theft, done until June 2006, when this methodological action of theft within the Department of Special Documentation of the institution was found: cut photos, faint traces of images, torn pages and identification labels, abandoned covers without content and, in some cases, not even that, like album number 27, which was not found. In this artwork, we can find reproductions of the albums content or empty boxes, and how they were found in the summer of 2006.

While creating a new work from an (non) existing one, Rennó, on the first instance, drives through the notion of authorship and appropriation within an artistic framework. Whereas, on another, she gives possible directions into copyright, or, with a Baudrillard sense, even about the copy and the replacement of the original. However, what she brings more is, also, a cleaning instead of a visual adding, by supressing those images governing contemporary society modes of living and space, determining a socio-cultural positioning. With this book, Rosângela Rennó opens to debate the several possibilities for interaction, in particularly because she clears history of its images and presents only those remnants from what was individually appropriated; she leaves history open to a reinterpretation of the archive, while putting in evidence all its omissions, intermissions, suppressions, contradictions, and disagreements.

In the structure of what makes and is from the real, when the first methodological action of appropriation was found, a displacement of the visual tricky, of a particular perception of history, started to originate. On the first instance, the removal of almost all content that might have referred to a particular moment in the history of Rio de Janeiro expresses a reversal action; one leading from an empty position in time resulting from loss to a state in where the construction of a new structure, which was once established by those same vanished images and documents, erupts in to a vacuous. This state of deprivation, where any referential that could have helped in the making of relations between objects and predictions, signifiers, and significations are absent; the subject is, therefore, reduced to the minimum level, like a refugee camp.

The second transmission occurs when the artist captures that loss and translated it into a new visual reference. One based on absence, on the erasure of history and signifier, whose “meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.” Comparatively, Joan Fontcuberta (1955, Barcelona, Spain) with Sputnik (1997) plays in the precise threshold where adding and erasing met, but with a socio-political framework on the construction of an historical narrative. Later on, Rancière adds that “the neutrality of the sentence causes the properties of social identification to waver. It thus derives from [the artist’s] effort to make [himself] invisible.” That is, the photographer’s effort to remove what makes the albums mere expressions of a determinate situation in the first instance, working as visual testimonies, and occupying it with something else, of intense visual understanding, that would be otherwise occupied by Rio de Janeiro’s already established non-neutral historical narrative, i.e. selective memory. Doris Salcedo (1958, Bogotá, Colombia) recuperates political historical periods that have been silenced in the reality of Colombia (that Colombians have tried to forget) and those consequences that have surrounded them; Alfredo Jaar (1956, Santiago de Chile, Chile) who creates installations where the only thing that is visible is the text that describes the image that is concealed in the installation rendering words as visual elements per se. Nonetheless, both of these two artists construct visual forms while transforming the non-visible, disturbing the system that establishes those connections in present day society. “This system drowns us in a flood of images in general, and images of fear in particular, thereby rendering us insensitive to the banalised reality of these fears.” But, most importantly, also by adding and erasing. A system of information based in a common generalisation framed and defined by extreme ones. The construction of “different realities, different spatiotemporal systems,” in the words of Jacques Rancière, “different communities of words and things, forms and meanings.” All those works, in particular those showing processes of erasure, new relations between words and visible forms. They, João César Monteiro and Rosângela Rennó, had shown us the bodies that create volume on a territory – that which creates resonances when in friction.

© Rosângela Rennó, A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23], 2013

The third instance happens when she creates a book (a more democratising medium per se when comparing to exhibitions or archived documents), instead of a work to be exhibit on galleries or museums walls; she creates space for a new narrative which affects the function of images in contemporary society, i.e. the spectacle, while offering a destructive action that would be open for a democratising debate arising from society’s identification with the unresolved. The spectacle as being dealt by Guy Debord, imperial images reassuring an intolerable reality, and by João César Monteiro, has he expressed on those watching at the start of the film.

In João César Monteiro’s film, the image is confronted with its condition and use. The act of showing a Black, or would it be a blank screen erasures, instead of adding[ii] to the medium enterprise. This very possibility can only happen by virtue of the medium's own condition, and above all by its massive use by contemporary society. What appears is, then, an erasure of memory, of the image brought from an imaginary archive on … whatever. Significantly, the projection on a surface of a blank image leaves and allows it, with space left to be filled in, with the unresolved. Affecting (to change), for this particular case, the possibilities of opening the aesthetic formulations on the institution of art; on those historical, political, and religious impositions of ideologies, and scientific ways of thinking and being that make way through ways of representation, and on the application of institutional power by mechanisms such as the conditional construction of order, the contingent imposition of what is true and what is real, and the predisposed exercise of police. Meaning the construction of an historical patrimony, of narratives protected by law (copyright and authorship) that are executed thereafter by the imposition of what is meant by a word, a text, a concept. Regardless, all communities have the right to know their history, but they also have the right to have their own memories. We shouldn’t and can’t impose! Thus, instead, we should inform about, share our individual stories and memories, while embracing difference, contradictions, and disagreements. Nonetheless, the act of repressing particular memories for long enough can lead to erase them completely. That is precisely what power structures such as History, State, Religion, Science, or the idea of Nature have been doing. Imposing political creeds and convictions that govern and rule society to direct or influence society’s behaviour, as well as the course of events. Closed formulations on practices and essences!

Bibliography:
Baudrillard, Jean (2003) Passwords. London: Verso
Rancière, Jacques (2011) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.
Schmidheiny, R. and Schmidheiny, S. 2005, The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, 5 October 2005-15 January 2006, IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland.

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Rosângela Rennó

---

[i] In 2008-2009 Rosângela Rennó published 2005-510117385-5, the first book of the series, which resulted from a research developed by the artist on the collection of photographs that had been stolen from the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), between April 2nd and July 14th 2005. The artist book, in two distinctive formats, adopts its name from the official number of the criminal inquire, 2005-510117385-5, and reproduces in actual size the back of each one of the 101 already retrieved photographs, and is sorted according to the date of their reintegration in the collection of the Division of Iconography of the National Library. In this book, the reader only has access to the written information about each image, not to what each photographic image reproduces. These photos were registered by UNESCO as part of Memory of the World programme, in 2003.

[ii] Technically in light – visual projections – the act of adding colours leads to the expressionless of White; whereas in other more tangible mediums, that is pigments or dyes such as drawing or painting, it is the opposite, the act of adding colours leads to the expression of Black.