LETICIA RAMOS_select works by leticia ramos

LETÍCIA RAMOS selected works

THE INVENTION OF INVENTION

What is the future of machines? What about their present? Machines, one can say, are good for speed acceleration, making space smaller, capturing images, and for many other things as essential as trivial, like copying a key in the corner locksmith. The more useful these objects are, the more invisible. They are brought to the world of visible and useless - things only when overtaken by more efficient machines, becoming mementos of a technologically obsolete era. This idea made me reflect on the place of the machines Letícia Ramos developed in recent years, now exhibited alongside with photographs and drawings. (And not by chance, at the Museu do Trabalho [Labor Museum] where contemporary art shows share space with a collection of machines that took part in the industrialization of the State of Rio Grande do Sul). Paradoxically, the machines built by the artist are already born in the future of machines, defined as the moment they are perceived as parts of the history of a given workmanship. Naturally, they were built within the context of art, thus were born for the museum, for being seen. The obsolescence of these objects is not caused, therefore, by their technological overcoming; they cannot be surpassed as they are not intended to overcome anything. Besides, at a glance they look completely unnecessary - as if Letícia was reinventing the wheel - as photographic and film equipment with the most elaborated capabilities already exist. Therefore, these machines can be perceived as being here, in our world, because they are deeply linked to pleasure, and just fairly related to usefulness. They are born to a specific image with plenty of mental constructions and conjectures about the unknown. Literature, science fiction, Franklin’s lab (from the Monica’s Gang comic books) arise as references to places where inventing the wheel is as primordial as the wheel itself. For not even pleasure is better than the pleasure of pleasure seeking. ERBF, POLAR and ESCAFANDRO, the cameras shown in this exhibition, were designed in the 2007-12 period, each made for a specific image. These objects were built from other objects; a 35 mm movie camera, Polaroid cameras, and underwater cameras were simultaneously the starting-point of these machines. Latícia’s cameras, as well as her photographs and films shown here, are dominated by a nostalgic atmosphere, and tell us about a bygone, analogic era when everyone had to travel by land or water. A time when capturing an image was an experience almost as extraordinary as reaching another place. But nostalgia is not the same as sentimental consevativeness. Hence, in these works there is not any trichish grievance of progress and its astounding velocities. The delight of inventors and explorers - past and present - is what really

springs from them. At their workshops, laboratories or computers, these curious and pertinacious people have a twinkle in their eyes that convinces us their gadgets are going to work. But they are not seriously concerned about it, once pursuing is maybe more important than finding. Besides these objects, the exhibition also displays the project of a film projector specially developed for a machine in the museum’s collection. This drawing was developed from a 35 mm-film drying cabinet (from the Museu do Trabalho collection), and takes us a bit closer to the artist’s creation process. We can see through it that another machine, born from the contact with this object, explores the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the original model in order to recover a sense of usefulness, however briefly. Not a movie industry utility, but for the magic, unique delight of moving images. In other words, Letícia starts from objects, or from the imagination of certain points of view - as in the ESCAFANDRO camera - to design cameras, and thus inverts the traditional principle of the history of images, according to which movie or photographic cameras generate visual stories. Taking sides with this overturning, this inverted logic, favors the construction of a kind of science fiction of the past. So the notions we have about “new” and “obsolete” are not precise anymore, and need to be reexamined. The photographs, drawings, and objects by Letícia Ramos invite us to a trip to the artist’s universe - a universe combining unknown future and past times, dwelled by phantasies and a concrete element: the construction of machines for image capturing. In a way, Leticia’s creative compass condenses these two poles which formely used to compose a dichotomy: imagination and knowledge. According to Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents”, usefulness and pleasure seeking are the “motive forces of all human activities”. (p.39)

Gabriela Mota 2013

Exhibitions: Museum of Labour, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2014 Cultural Center Sao Paulo - CCSP, Sao Paulo, 2010

ERBF - Instant Sequential Camera Object Wood, metal and fabric 130 x 150 x 30 cm N/A 2007

Instant Sequential I_Frame 35 mmphotography printed on cotton paper 100 x 100 cm 2009

Panoramica 1 35mm photography printed on cotton paper 67 x 200 cm 1/3 + 1AP 2009

Detail of Panoramica 1

BITÁCORA

Bitácora of Letícia Ramos combines her production of the last two years in multiple relationships with the imagination of adventure, geographical romance and science fiction; full of sense, are put together here for this solo exhibition her notebook of notebooks and the circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle. The show presents three working scales: Polaroids, extensions (almost painting) and artifacts (barometric windletter studies on the expedition boat, notebooks, traces and evidence of field trip) and videos. Under the supernatural interference of the low northern lights, high frequency of blue and green landscapes made lean their cameras spontaneously capturing effects of Super-8 sci-fi photography. The explorer figure that doesn’t appear, only shows to the visitor his impressions of his imagery traces Establishing contact between the nature descriptions practiced by Captain Hátteras de Jules Verne in his trip to the North Pole, blunts, from the collection of these stops, the feeling of a new beginning for the world. What is seen in the distance are relics and materials testimonies walled between the past and the future, a trail of the white predictable polar- colors of atmospheric precipitations in the Arctic. One can understand the principle of such a chromatic distortion when we closely observe the wind chemical reactions caused by the high / low pressure differences and by the air mass of hot air and cold white clouds (water vapor). For this exhibition the artist worked with repeating scales in blocks, between small and large movements, they seem different but are confined to the same split second frames. Ideally it looks like Letícia Ramos seeks an impossible synthesis of being worked, to have only one scene, as if she was trying to found a new place through a single image, and thus discover the organic-etymological origin of a new imagined continent, its time history, the progress, The landmark of the stone, The field of the stone, The image of the stone, The map which is a stone. Above all, in Bitácora, is given the confidence to really believe the images that are shown from the construction of own optical devices (and not or maybe how to show everywhere images to be displayed).

Marcio Harum 2012

Exhibitions: Mendes Wood Galley, Sao Paulo, 2012

Polar 8 Polaroid Photography from Lupa 6 camera 19 x 27 cm N/A 2012

Wind camera 2012

Polar Volcano Print on cotton paper 18 x 52 cm 1/5 + 2 AP 2012

The Stone Image Print on cotton paper from Polaroid 36,5 x 54,5 cm 1/5 + 2 AP 2012

Paleolithic III Print on cotton paper from Polaroid 60 x 45,5 cm 1/3 + 2 AP 2012

White Panorama Print on cotton paper from Polaroid 56,5 x 151 cm 1/3 + 2 AP 2012

Solar Wind Polaroid Photography / 35mm video - video looping 4â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2012

Polar Wind Print on cotton paper from Polaroid 61 x 55,5 cm each 1/3 + 2 AP 2012

Particles Print on cotton paper from Polaroid 61 x 57 cm each 1/3 + 2 AP 2012

Paleolithic Polaroid Photography from 7 x 9.5 cm N/A 2012

BLACK DESERT

Syndrome of Isis Feeling too small to face a landscape is one of the worst traps we can fall. Certainly, there will be something embarrassing in every situation of confrontation with nature. The feeling of sublime can occur in different ways and manifest itself strangely in some individuals. Discovered in the early seventeenth century and described by scientist Albert Francis in the Asclepius Medical Compendium, Isis syndrome is characterized by a deep melancholy that settles in subjects who observe beautiful landscapes. Some extreme cases, reporting this event, talk of suicide. For three decades, Albert Francis observed the behavior of some nature explorers, climbers, cavers and divers. Among them, the french Charles Albanel, explorer who committed suicide to get on top of a mountain located in the Canadian territory in 1696. In this tragic occasion, Charles Albanel had eighty years old, advanced age for individuals with suicidal tendencies. [Statistical science proves that a subject suicidal always anticipates his death before reaching the age of fifty]. A letter found in Albanel coat pocket recounts the reasons that led him to commit suicide: “(...) I chose this landscape to be my last image and save it in an eternity of feelings that human retinas do not reach.” From this report, I think of the photographs produced by Letícia Ramos and the feelings that such images trigger in my emotional memories. I’m too afraid to die. And it is only for this reason that I do not commit suicide. At the same time, little deaths happen when I find myself on some photographs of Letícia. Here, I return to the landscapes of a future that we will never know. From a pre-photographic future when the notion of landscape had not even been invented and when Isis took care of the Earth and the Moon. Michel Zózimo 2013

Exhibitions: Exhibition “Volar”, curator Paula Borghi, Museu Del Infinito Arte, Buenos Aires, 2012 Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, 2015

Paleozoic Super8 photography printed on cotton paper 35,5 x 20 cm 1/5 + !PA 2012

Future Perfect Super8 photography printed on cotton paper 35,5 x 20 cm 2012

Lunar Volcano Super8 photography printed on cotton paper 35,5 x 20 cm 1/5 + 1PA 2012

The Dark Side of the Moon Super8 photography printed on cotton paper 35,5 x 20 cm 2012

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE MARS

The series of works presented in this exhibition is a tribute to the romantic scientific imagination, to the idea of the future of the 50s, to the multidisciplinary inventors and to discoverers of distant worlds.The name of the exhibition comes from a title found in a newspaper article about the arrival of Curiosity to Mars last year, and it’s a direct reference to the phrase “We’ll Always Have Paris” from the movie Casablanca. The presented works build a narrative near to science-fiction, an inventory of images that speak of the scientist lost in time and space. The exhibition consists of photographs produced from a microfilm process, as well as a 35mm short-film entitled VOSTOK. The film was made from miniatures and it records the trajectory of a microsubmarine adrift in the depths of a prehistoric lake submerged in the Antarctic ice.

Exhibitions: BES Photo, Collection Berardo Museum, Lisbon, 2014 Tomie Ohtake Institute, Sao Paulo, 2014

Landscape #1 Microfilm printed on cotton paper 2 x (100 x 211 cm) 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

Landscape #2 Microfilm printed on cotton paper 2 x (100 x 211 cm) 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

Meteorite I Microfilm printed on cotton paper 5 x (100 x 85 cm) 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

#1 e #2 Microfilm printed on cotton paper 2 x (100 x 76 cm) 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

Teleportation Polaroid printed on cotton paper 100 x 140 cm 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

Slit Polaroid printed on cotton paper 110 x 140 cm 1/3 + 2 AP 2014

Tape Test Microfilm 10 x 35 cm N/A 2014

Spectrum Polaroid 8,5 x 19 cm 2014

VOSTOK - a prologue + rehearsal for orchestra recording

ON DEEP WATER

The I Ching, known as The Book of Changes, a cornerstone of the eastern cannon, became a source for consultation and an oracle, for various strategic actions adopted by different dictatorships and military governments - subverting its real intention. When it was translated to English in the early 20th century, if rapidly became a reference for North American capitalists, as well to eastern fellows. Likewise, fictions or pseudo-scientific theories became source for the brutal radicalism of some extremist movements. In the Nazi regime, for instance, the writings of Karl Neupert were foundational for the Hohlweltlehre movement, the ‘Hollow Earth’ theory. It is known that some upper echelon members of the Nazi party were adept to the Thule Gesellschaft, a sort of Neotemplar order mixed with occultist practices and hermetic magic sciences, founded by the German Rudolf von Sebottendorff. This type of literature that mixes fiction and science dates back to the 17th century, more precisely to the studies by Edmund Halley, who claimed the Earth was hollow, and that there were three other spheres within it. Inside these spheres there would be new forms of life, which were not aware of the existence of entities in the larger spheres. It would be up to the external beings, in that case, humans, to dig holes and access them. One century later, the mathematician Euler came up with another theory, stating that there were no multiple spheres inside the earth, but only one hollow sphere, and that superior forms of life lived inside it. These two theories were the base for studies that founded the book механика скрытой вселенной, Mechanics of the Hidden World, by the Russian scientist Ivan Korolenko. Not by accident, a copy of this book was found in a time capsule that Soviets implanted in the ocean through a Russian bathyscaphe, in the 20th century, which would only be found in 2050. It is very likely that this publication also served as inspiration for expeditions of a Soviet micro-submarine, which was the only submersible able to go deeper than 100,000 feet. In one of its missions, the submarine was sent to the Antarctic, aiming to explore a murky lake that had been frozen for thousands of years. The recent increase in global temperatures revealed the lake, which was named VOSTOK. There, life would be different, because Soviet scientists believed that such a lake could conserve a prehistoric world, maintaining forms of life that had never been seen before. The film VOSTOK, by Letícia Ramos, recounts a little of this story: an element of a complex network of proofs and documents that confirm the existence of a place we are not familiar with yet. The ground of prehistoric waters, then, is captured by the submarine built by the artist, reminding us of Soviet explorations. By manipulating image tools, Letícia

can extract from the infra-mince the most sensitive of the remarkable. And here, by looking at references left for us by photography, I remember only a few similar cases. Some examples are the paranormal experiences by the North American Ted Serios, with a camera that took pictures of thoughts; the studies by the Russians Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, who created a machine to register the energy surrounding our body; the device built by the German Augusto Mayer, a machine that was able to capture the energy spheres our hands emanate; the melancholic Optogram, by Dr. Vernois, who could record the last image seen by the retina of the dead; and, finally, the unlikely equipment invented by the French Hippolyte Baraduc: a huge camera without lenses that was able to take photographs of God. It is uncertain whether or not these devices really existed, but their images show us that faith is not only a system of belief based on the unlikely. Moreover, it goes where science finds tricks and where magic faces the cinema. In these fields, there are invisible lines drawing them apart, at once bringing them together at the same time. If we demand proof of scientific theories and postulates, document records and practical experiences will show us an example of these metafictions. And for those who doubt the Hollow Earth treaty, it is worth a visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia which safeguards the model of this world, designed in the 19th century by J. Cleves Symmes. Or, if nearby, it is worth a visit to the Aquarium built by Letícia Ramos. These two constructs are other ways of exemplifying theories that require no confirmation, such as cinema, literature and even history. Therefore, there will be no doubts regarding experiments that invent the world inside the world itself, be it filled with air or taken by water. Michel Zózimo 2013

Exhibitions: “VOSTOK”, CAPC - Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 2015 19º Edição Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, 2015 BES Photo, Collection Berardo Museum, Lisbon, 2014 “VOSTOK - Screening #1”, Mendes Wood Gallery, Sao Paulo, 2014 “VOSTOK - A prologue”, Pivô - Art and Research, Sao Paulo, 2013 WRO Art Center - WRO Bienal, 2013

VOSTOK Frame 16 mm video transferred to video 2013

Sketch for stereoscopic image Object and collage 21 x 15 cm (object) and 30 x 30 cm (collage) N/A 2013

VOSTOK in progress models Cultural Center PIVĂ&#x201D; - Art and Research - 2013

GRAIN

The film tells the story of a human colony on an incognito planet where an old cereal silo has been built. Natural phenomena and climate changes cause the silo to break and a strange plantation starts to grow. Winner project of the Videoart Award, awarded by the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation. Project fully realized with models and microscopic file image manipulation in open studio model in PIVÔ - Art and Research in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Exhibitons: Exhibition “Plagiarising the future”, curator Bruno Leitão, Hangar, Lisbon, 2016 35ª Edition of ArcoMadrid Fair, Mendes Wood Gallery, Madrid, 2016

Grain frame 16mm transferred to video 2016

GRAIN in progress models Cultural Center PIVĂ&#x201D; - Art and Research - 2016

HOLOGRAPHIC STUDIES

Somewhere in the future old holographic experiences are found in an aquarium building revealing studies of meteorites and electronic specie till then unknownâ&#x20AC;?. Presented at the Parque Lage aquarium in Rio de Janeiro, this site-specific work sought to create an environment between the real and the fictional by building holographic devices where, for example, the real aquarium fishes were confronted with the holographic fishes from the artificial cave.

Exhibitons: Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, 2015

Exterior View - Parque Lage Aquarium, Rio de Janeiro

Interior View - Parque Lage Aquarium, Rio de Janeiro

Holographic Underwater Study # 2 Waterproof case, led screen and acrylic pyramid 20 x 50 x 50 cm 2015

SABOTAGE

When Letícia Ramos e Márcia Xavier chose, from the vast collection of Casa da Imagem, the photographs of destruction of an archive room as a starting point for their conjoint exposition in that institution, they didn’t know that those photographs were about. Sabotage? Vandalism? Destruction of evidence? The black and white photographs carried marks of the time and circumstances in which they were taken. More than a journalistic approach, they looked like police records of the incident. The large metallic filing cabinets full of old paper documents suggested a scenery from the middle of the last century. They could locate, in one of the documents spread across the floor of the destroyed place, a year: 1944. In the very files of Casa da Imagem they found that the incident happened at São Paulo’s city Hall’s head office. By research in newspapers in that time (from 1944 to 1950), they found, in O Estado de São Paulo of August 2, 1947, the exact reference in the headline: “Fires, stonings, forays, shootings on the streets and squares of São Paulo”, along with: “The City Hall’s head office on Líbero Badaró Street was stoned and then assaulted”. Then, they discovered it was the aftermath of the protests against the rise of mass transit’s fares at that time. The astounding coincidence with the events that took place in São Paulo in the first semester of 2014 was one more link in a net of documentary investigation and artistic instigation, which motivated the artists. From this puzzle of facts and photographs, Márcia and Letícia started to conceive this environment-installation, where six overhead retroprojectors; a backlight with the light from one of the windows; a peephole; prerecorded sounds, and microphones that capture in real-time the steps of the ones that enter; a film produced and projected in 16 mm simulating facts that can be only intuited; and a sequence of stroboscopic pictures of a filing cabinet falling in space compose the dense and tense atmosphere of sabotage. The motor of this creation isn’t the chronicle, the fidelity to the facts, or the social criticism of that context, but the transmutation of vestiges and clues into a sensitive experience, in present time. There is no clear narrative, but an appropriation of a universe of references in order to create an environment from which hatch sensations of dazzle and fear, beauty and menace, vertigo and violence, order and disorder. Traces, signs, nods of hidden facts. Like a film noir with no plot. Different from Hélio Oiticica’s “seja marginal/seja herói” [“be an outlaw/be a hero”], this appropriation of the criminal universe (or the breaking of social norms) doesn’t come impregnated with an ideological bias. It seems only an inspiration. The relation is made more by a metonymic association, in which the photographs not only become part of the installation (changed by projections, distortions, and optical devices) but also serve as an impulse to the constitution of its atmosphere. Spots of chaos on the tissue of social order, motivating the changing of our preestablished cognitive

structures. Instead of a message, a mood. Instead of a narrative, a sensorial experience – which wraps the visitor in sound, light, image, touch. Sabotage of the senses. The fact that this environment is set precisely in an institution which purpose is to keep an organized collection of old images (materialized memory) establishes a paradox that subverts our perception of real. This subversion evokes something sublime when it throws us in the vertigo of an atavistic disorder, set in the orderly space where its spark was archived.

Arnaldo Antunes 2014

Exhibitions: Casa da Imagem, Sao Paulo, 2014

Study for the fall of a cabinet Stroboscopic Photography 144 x 122 cm 2014

Study for the fall of a sheet of paper Stroboscopic Photography 100 x 60 cm (each) 2014

Sabotage 16mm Projection, 3â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2014

Sabotage frame 16mm transferred to film 2014

LETÍCIA RAMOS (Santo Antônio da Patrulha, Brazil, 1976) Lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Her artistic research focuses on creating photographic apparatus adequate for capturing and reconstructing movement and presenting it through video, photography and installation. With a particular interest in the science of fiction, she developed complex geographical novels in some of her series, such as ERBF, Bitácora and Vostok. Chance, as well as experimentation with photography and the artistic process, are directions which can be seen in her work. Her works have been exhibited in art spaces such as the Tate Modern (London), the Pivô - Art and Research Center (Sao Paulo), Itaú Cultural (Sao Paulo), the São Paulo Cultural Center, Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro), the Berardo Collection Museum, (Lisbon) the Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo), and CAPC- Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux). She was given important awards, was selected for several art residencies, and won many art production grants, among which the Marc Ferréz Award for developing the “Bitácora” project (2011/2012). As a result of this research, the artist published a book intitled “Cuaderno de Bitácora” and participated at The Artic Circle art residence (2011) aboard a sailboat which headed towards the North Pole. The photographic work produced during the expedition won the Brazil Photography Award - contemporary research (2012). In 2013 she participated in the program “Islan Session”, in the context of the the 9th Mercosul Biennial. That same year, she developed the project [VOSTOK] which consisted of a fictional trip to a prehistoric lake submerged in Antarctica. The project resulted in a virtual publication, a 35mm film, a book and an LP, as well a new performance which was presented during the Videobrasil Festival 19th edition in 2015. In 2014, she was awarded the Moreira Salles Institute Photography Grant, and used it to develop a research called “MICROFILM”, which ended up winning the Bes Photo international award. She received the Video Art Prize, given by the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, for the development of a new project called GRÃO [GRAIN]. She recently received the Arts Grant from the Botín Foundation (Spain) for the development of the “Historia Universal de Los Terremotos” project and was one of the PIPA Prize 2015 artists finalists, and is once again one of the selected artists for the PIPA Prize 2016. She has exhibitions scheduled for Fundación Botín (Spain) and for the Nouveau Musée National (Monaco). Her works belongs to the collections of MAM - Museum od Modern Art in São Paulo, do MAM - Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, of Itaú Culltural in Sao Paulo of Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, of Moreira Salles Institut, of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos, of MAC - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio Grande do Sul, of Videobrasil Cultural Association and of Nouveau Musée National in Monaco.