Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Ever since the beginning of her career, in 2004, artist Letícia Ramos has been straddling the boundaries between the creation of photographical apparatuses and the presentation of moving images that are not exactly recognizable. Her early works—the Estufa (Greenhouse, 2004) and Projeto vermelho (Red project, 2006) videos—, made in collaboration with Luiz Roque, articulate landscapes and elements that are not exactly natural, and which assail the visual plane. In between the plants in a greenhouse or in the mist in a mountain range, colorful clouds of smoke emerge and mix in with the landscape, at the same time reaffirming their compositional character, which is not given, but built through the perspective, the framing, the choices made by the subject behind the camera. However, whereas in these early films her concern lies mostly in the image, qualities, and narrative potentialities of this construct, starting with the ERBF* (2007) project, she begins to create specific machines to capture certain images.

And ERBF was only the beginning. Ever since, other apparatuses were built to capture other scenes, such as the one developed for the Cronópios** (2009) video installation, a film shot using a set of three eight-lens Lomo Oktographic cameras. This type of camera makes it possible to record a scene for 2.5 seconds, from different perspectives. Not incidentally, it was the system of choice for recording a day at Largo de Pinheiros square, in São Paulo, from dawn until dusk.

Currently, Letícia is involved in the Bitacora project, which consists of developing a polar camera capable of recording chromatic nuances of the landscape, based on the influence of the wind. The project should lead to the artist’s undertaking an artist residency program called The Arctic Circle, a multidisciplinary expedition that will travel across the Arctic Pole on a sailboat in 2011. These apparatuses generate images with different temporalities, textures, and angles, redefining concepts such as capturing, recording, and visuality.

It is in this bipolar trajectory between strange landscapes and oddball machines that the analytical crossroads, which the observer is unable to escape, reaffirms itself.

In other words, whereas the visual problem the artist presents us with is the landscape, which is quite complex in itself, there is also the issue of the audiovisual equipment that captures the images of that landscape. These machines, specially built for recording a certain landscape, condensate the scientific and imaginative effort of foretelling what one wishes to capture and elaborating the technology capable of doing so. That is, in the beginning there is nothing, neither camera nor image. Between the asepsis of that which is visual, distant, quasi abstract, the image-landscape recorded by the camera, and the filmic apparatus filled with physical materiality, there lies a conceptual abyss that the artist insists on facing using nails and poetry, wood and music, drill and phasm (the representation of reality).

For example, I dare to say that in her Bitacora project, currently under development, the proposal of creating a machine “capable of recording chromatic nuances of the landscape, based on the influence of the wind” is not very important in terms of information about the work. What is of interest indeed is to learn that the artist is studying and reinventing the mechanical structure of Polaroid cameras, taking in what this technology represented when it emerged—the possibility of instant, immediate recording—, and relating this sort of record to the notes and technologies used by the travelers who set off precariously to the North and South Poles in the late 19th century. In other words, there is not a chance that this machine will not fulfill its purpose, considering that the latter is less important than the machine itself. And the image that will result from this apparatus will be the only image that could result from it.

In Letícia’s proposals, it is not possible to look at the object and not see the image that it is capable of generating, or vice versa. The work of art takes place in this fantastic relationship between materiality and visuality, making it impossible to point out what comes first: the near-childlike curiosity of disassembling and reassembling equipment or the inconformity with what has come to be defined as landscape. As a matter of fact, it is the lack of a set of values in between these opposites and utter strictness in the building of both that grants a radically poetic meaning to her works of art, which are among the “ends with no end” (finalidades sem fim, in Portuguese) of which Antonio Cícero speaks to us in his namesake book, in which he addresses the “meaning” of artistic creation.

There is something about artists such as Letícia that verges on a sort of biological condemnation, similar to the one that defines the trajectory of certain beings or explorers: there is no alternative other than to go on seeking new trips.

Gabriela Kremer Motta is a curator, critic, and visual arts researcher.Currently pursuing a doctorate in art history, critics, and theory from the School of Communication and Arts (ECA) at the University of São Paulo (USP), she is a curator for the team of the 2011–2012 Rumos Itaú Artes Visuais program. She is the artistic manager of the Ecarta gallery and a lecturer in the cultural management course at Unisinos – the Sinos River Valley University. Among others, she curated the exhibitions Convivência Espacial (in Recife and Porto Alegre, 2010) and Campo Coletivo (São Paulo, 2008).

*Estação radiobase fotográfica (ERBF, Portuguese for Base transceiver photographic station) is a project geared towards investigating and conceiving a piece of audiovisual equipment developed from the crossing between two of the artist’s fields of interest: landscape and the motion recording technologies. The machine is a cinematographic pinhole camera, capable of capturing different perspectives of a given landscape at once. The project’s name makes reference to the actual Base Transceiver Stations, communication antennae seen on skyscrapers in São Paulo, and which are the “landscape” chosen to be portrayed using the machine.

Regarding your background as an architect, how did your artistic production and the building of the optical equipment come about? 

I went to Architecture School at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. I believe that my entire artistic training has come from that source. There, I learned to see the world in three dimensions, to have a creative work process, and especially to develop techniques in drawing, projects, and detailing. It was also in college that I began conducting my first photographic experiments: I worked at the photo lab, I was a teacher’s assistant in descriptive geometry, and I was particularly dedicated to the matters of urbanism and scale model. What always interested me, however, was the very procedure for a given project, rather than its purpose. I was never able to complete a single project for a commercial building. Thus, I came up with several conceptual scale models, lots of schematic drawings, lots of new proposals and questionings about space and its relations. In 1998, while still attending architecture school, I made my first short film, in Super 8, entitledHá alguém no vento (There is someone in the wind). This single-copy film, shot on celluloid, edited using scissors and adhesive tape in my living room, triggered a realization that my architectural work was not commercial, and that my involvement with architecture was actually in the structural aspect of my thinking, in the use and knowledge of the triad: SPACE – TIME – TRAJECTORY.
In 2002 I moved to São Paulo to work in commercial film production and to attend the School of Cinema at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation. My professional career in audiovisual was already geared towards film editing and postproduction. I already had a good technical background doing that, therefore during the course I focused all my work on experimenting artistically to the maximum and using all the tools that the university environment of the time could offer me. Within this context I did what I consider to be my first individual artistic project, entitled ERBF, which later became my course conclusion work. That was the piece that truly led me to realize that the limit between art, cinema, and architecture is very tenuous and that my research was actually closer to contemporary art procedures than to architecture or cinema, stricto sensu. The building of optical paraphernalia was a need to produce some sort of equipment that would also relate conceptually, in its technical practice of image formation, with the subject that I wanted to approach.

What is it that truly moves you today, after some of your work has already been successfully exhibited, to go on developing devices meant for photography-film-video?

Being an explorer/inventor and coming up with new landscapes.

What is the artifact that bridges the gap between cinema and architecture in your work?

Project-oriented structuring of thought results in a “functional” object, as do the mechanisms for deconstructing and reconstructing space. If I were to name a practical “artifact,” I would say the propelling pencil.

What is the difference between the labor involved in creating the project and carrying it out in a workshop? What is it like to go from editor to artisan-inventor?

A project on the clipboard is based on an ideal world, in a way that is precise, calculated, yet vague with regard to its pragmatic use. The drawing per se is a practice that pertains to abstract thinking. For those reasons, the coming and going from project to prototype is what materializes the object and broadens the possibilities of research. My choices are interfered with by the scale of the real, the materials available on the market, in the studio, in antique stores, the adaptations, and recycling. The project is not untouchable, but rather it interacts with these different spheres and adapts itself all the time before reaching its final form. As it is carried out by me, it is just a way of recording and quantifying the thinking of the machine. It is a way of conveying to other people the notion of organizing the creation of certain items in the workshop. But the project only becomes real in its construction, in between the screw and the screwdriver, in the hits and misses.
A conceptual effort can be made to arrive at many different analogies between working in a workshop and working in front of a computer as a film editor. Both are preceded by creative processes and the big difference lies in the use of tools, which requires craftsmanship to a greater or lesser extent.
Film editing can be a craft as well, such as when one relinquishes the use of plug-ins to obtain effects digitally, and does it manually instead. Or else when we use tricks and edit films in Moviolas, putting the parts of the negative together one by one. The montage of the Cronópios films is one example. And just as the editing can also be done by hand, woodworking can also be mechanical, if we think of a furniture factory. The big different to me lies in the absorption of chance, in the purpose of the work that one aims to develop. I get the feeling that this is my technique: combining tools with different technologies. That is why my computer is always so dirty and I even have a software program to calculate each exact pinhole.

Revisiting the theme of the architecture and design exhibition Brasilien baut Brasilia (Brazil builds Brasília), organized by Mary Vieira in Zurich and Berlin between 1957 and 1959: Does a city of the future also mean a city of the present?

Brasília has always been an issue, especially when it comes to envisioning the city of the future. We are aware of the modern failure of functional sectorization and its evolvement of thinking it as a relational space and a space for learning, as we have seen in Jane Jacobs’ theories. I believe that Brasília has achieved its goal as a plan for a modern city, but modern man has not headed in the direction that was planned for him. However, at the same time, when we see projects such as Lina Bo Bardi’s for SESC Pompeia functioning in the reality of its maximum utopia, we must ask ourselves whether some of these spaces have been planned for utopian people instead. I recently gave an address at a symposium in Porto Alegre on the theme: “Expanding the present, contracting the future.” The temporal layers of a city, the speed with which it takes place, lead the perception of the present time to be the future. The question could be a multiple one: What do we have as a serious reflection about the city of today? Why wait for tomorrow to take the actions we know for a fact will be necessary? If we already possess hard data, why know where it all is going to lead us? In my work, the city of the future is based on genre, in imagery and fiction. Perhaps even in the very stereotype of future. Most of all, what I try is to create a major temporal confusion. I produce films that seem out of the 18th century, however address current themes and futuristic imagery from a recent past. These multiple layers mingle and give rise to this big fiction, this time machine.

The built optical apparatus

Detrás de un muro un jardín efímero
Un mar que no es mar
Un cielo de agua, paredes de hojas
Mirar por una rendija un jardín escondido*
(Jardín del Cronópios, 2008)

With each investigative step taken amidst the set of the latest works by artist Letícia Ramos, one can find a new city with a remote past, as a result of this exploration of visual meaning.

Since 2005, her moving image output has taken a winding direction, with regard to the solutions she finds, considering the recurrence of postproduction resources accessible. Based on the knowledge gathered through her excellence in the fields from which she has come, firstly architecture and then cinema, and throughout the paths that she proposes and on which she remains for as long as she finds necessary, Letícia Ramos makes use of precise notions with which she has experimented as the space irrupts, a widely recognizable feature in her video works.

Obelisks

ERBF – Estação radiobase fotográfica (Base transceiver photographic station – video, object, and photography, 2005–2009) brings together, in one single snapshot taken at twenty-four frames per second, different perspectives of the skyline of the city of São Paulo.

Comprising the series Instantâneos sequenciais #1, #2, #3, and #4(Sequential snapshots) and Panorâmica 01 (Panoramic 01 – 35mm/video, 1 min, looped projection, 2005), frantic animations pop up spontaneously like outlines of the city itself, surrounded by base transceiver stations and broadcasting antennae. Belonging in a new category of outlines, these aerial monuments induce an attempt at fixing one’s gaze amidst a landscape that has an admittedly metropolitan horizon. Thus, one watches as the silhouette of a forest created as an image of moving illusion emerges.

Following the sequence of identical holes, placed side by side at equal focal distances from one another, we have the camera built specifically, without lenses, by the artist. What seems to really matter in the relations between the pieces of work by Letícia Ramos is not the image of the object that is moving, but the ways in which the camera sees a given perspective of the object. Such singularity catapults her work to beyond the realm of conventional recordings of time.

In other words, perhaps it means displacing the very constructo of choosing the pinhole over a piece of equipment as established as the film camera. Likelihood aside, it would be like stopping the giant natural landscapes of Marc Ferrez’, unthinkable feats at a time in which photographic missions required chests of provisions and equipment carried by men and on the backs of mules.

From this point of technical inflection on, the artist began chasing the perfect woodworking fit, in a constant quest that is still ongoing in weekly testing sessions of new camera prototypes. She also takes care of negative development herself. Her constant observation of the city imprints deep visual changes—which do not by any means remain limited to getting the best framing or angle—, as was confirmed by the exhibit of ERBF at the São Paulo Cultural Center in 2009. Letícia Ramos’ expedition aims to establish a different temporality with the photographed object—as if it were a target in the air atop a tall building.


Hanging gardens

From inside the wall, through a gap in the façade painted white, a soft, disquieting sound from a music box is overheard on the sidewalk. Passersby are compelled to peep through the gap, where visual narratives of dreams are seen in Jardim fantástico (Fantastic garden, 35mm/video, 3 min, 2008).

With a push of the side door, the fiction garden, structured out as a passage, opens itself up to unrestrained enjoyment. Coming through the glass of the window panes in its path of guyed reflections, Jardim efêmero (Ephemeral garden) is comprised of two different projections: a narrow corridor filled with leaves that reveal themselves in a ghostly manner under the beam of light from the projector in the video Hojas takes the eyes almost all the way down to the back wall of the warehouse, where a projection of the Mar (Sea) video evokes, in an enlarged scale, the contemplation of the sea.

Using recordings made with an eight-lens Lomo Oktomatic camera, like sceneries, the multichannel projections that comprise Jardín del Cronópio(Garden of Cronópio, video installation + looped videos, 2008) open up a free territory for wandering in the outdoor gardens, as in the exhibition held at the ThisIsNotAGallery, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A stroll around the square

The video installation Cronópios (35mm/looped video, 2008–2009) plays back an entire day at the Largo da Batata square, in São Paulo, from dawn until dusk. Located in the Pinheiros neighborhood, this strangling of heavy traffic is the passage between the expanded center and the outskirts of the city. Heavy converging traffic causes jams in the area, coupled with a slow and ambitious reurbanization project.

Developed especially for that end, the image-capturing system (a set of three Lomo Oktographic cameras with eight lenses each) helped create this piece of work. From different places, seen during a period of 2.5 seconds each, many simultaneous portraits of one single scene are shown, with a powerful motion-like effect in combinations of angle and superimpositions.

The multiple assembly of this video installation takes place through saturated light refraction obtained by projecting through a transparent sheet onto one single acrylic screen. However, the use of this material causes two other ghost projections, at specific angles, that respond with oscillating lighting.

In 2008 and 2009, in four Brazilian capitals (São Paulo, Curitiba, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro), people were able to walk around this acrylic screen, set so it could be seen from all different refractory angles, and feel the pulse of the city close to their eyes, under the Rumos Artes Visuais national program of the Itaú Cultural Institute.

*Behind a wall an ephemeral garden
A sea that is no sea
A sky made of water, stone walls
Looking through a gap into a hidden garden