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.