Associação Cultural Videobrasil

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.