5 minute read
Leaking Lands
All images: Ofri Cnaani, ‘Leaking Lands’, installation view, Rampa; photographs by Mariana Vilanova, courtesy the artist, Rampa, and SIRIUS.
MIGUEL AMADO AND GEORGIA PERKINS OUTLINE A SOLO SHOW BY OFRI CNAANI PRESENTED AT RAMPA IN COPRODUCTION WITH SIRIUS.
THE ARTIST OFRI Cnaani addresses the omnipresence of the digital in everyday life. Specifically, she considers contemporary society’s reliance on algorithms as related to data generation, collection, archiving, and monetisation, and the inevitable accompanying questions of control and extraction in the context of so-called cognitive capitalism. For example, the photographic series Statistical Bodies (2021) investigates how the body is mapped as it has become networked by data aggregation and analysis – quantified through massive accumulations of information on purchases made, bank accounts maintained, and online platforms used.
Cnaani draws from educational protocols such as research and teaching to examine various institutional settings. Having previously worked in the museum sector, she often incorporates the docent position into performances that confront the ways in which knowledges and histories are both produced and communicated. This strategy informs the exhibition ‘Leaking Lands’, which features a 2022 film of the same title, premiering on this occasion, and Testimony of Things (2022), a series of prints combining text and imagery. Both works take the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point.
The National Museum of Brazil is a product of colonialism. It was founded in 1818 by the Portuguese royal family under the name Royal Museum to host items assembled by the colonisers. Its collection grew to around twenty million items and evolved through expeditions, excavations, acquisitions, donations, and exchanges. Diminishing funding from the Brazilian government, and the increasingly contested political nature of the institution, culminated two hundred years later in its slippage into disarray and neglect.
The fire caused devastating and irreparable damage to the collection, which included a large component of Brazilian Indigenous heritage. On a more symbol-
ic level, it likewise engulfed much of the institution’s remaining raison d’être, founded as it was on the Portuguese-Brazil colonialist legacy.
To create Leaking Lands, Cnaani assembled personal and institutional photographic documentation as well as multiple spoken and written accounts of the institution’s past and collection to construct a speculative institutional memory. The work is divided into three chapters – Error, Storage, and Leaks – presented concurrently as a three-channel video projection. Each chapter deals with different systems of storage that hold memory, trauma, and information, and examines the ‘entries’ and ‘spills’ in and out of these realms, including the archive, data, and the body. In the absence of the institution itself, Cnaani ‘imagines’ it by looking at the digital traces of objects, whether archived or on display. She focuses on the institution’s immaterial re-emergence thanks to an ad-hoc online image bank created by staff and visitors.
The film depicts the artist sorting through visitors’ photographs uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, engaging in intimate contact with digital residues of the lost items, while we hear voices of some staff members revisiting the building and recalling ‘ghost’ stories through a virtual tour. It also features the Uruguay-born choreographer, luciana achugar, exploring the sensorial quality of objects through a performance conducted remotely, using words and sounds that suggest positive feelings and sensations to heal colonialist embodied trauma.
Leaking Lands operates across various institutionalised forms of guidance via territories – real, fictional, historic, and virtual – which manifest through sensory faculties such as the aural, tactile, and visual, and thus change the kinds of experiences one might have of the institution, post-fire. Through immaterial documentation, the institution is transmuted into images and stories of objects once stored or exhibited and now only partially identified and/or remembered. Knowledge of
the collection is thus amassed, yet remains necessarily fragmented, incomplete, and in flux.
Testimony of Things is a speculative and fictionalised narrative of the fire. This ensemble of texts and images considers the nonhuman figures that are present in the physical remains of objects. The texts present accounts of the fire and the institution through the perspective of six entities that ‘translate’ matter into something virtual: meteorite, water, ashes, skins, JPG, and cursor. One of the images shows the artist sorting through a selection of photographs of archived or exhibited objects and placing them into the form of a collage; another depicts the meteorite; another shows a staff member with her tattooed arm representing the institution’s façade.
‘Leaking Lands’ marks a continuation of Cnaani’s research into the (im)possibility of making ‘absent’ or ‘remote’ guided tours through the afterlife of the National Museum of Brazil. The exhibition is a meditation and a mediation on tools for preserving what has been erased in the institution, thanks both to the fire and to the colonialist practices that informed its foundational principles. In this way it also speaks to other institutional settings that share colonial origins, surfacing the subalternisation of narratives and identities of the other – Indigenous, Black, queer, and of the Global South.
Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of SIRIUS in Cobh, County Cork. Georgia Perkins is a researcher and curatorial fellow at SIRIUS. siriusartscentre.ie
‘Leaking Lands’ runs until 18 March at Rampa, Porto, Portugal in coproduction with SIRIUS. rampa.pt
