Associação Cultural Videobrasil

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.