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. ROSÂNGELA RENNÓ

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The 3rd Beijing Photo Biennial, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing - China, 2018

Venetian tour scrapbook, 2009-2010

book/album/sculpture in 3 parts Photos Marcos Pinto The present stone-faced walls, forming a circular plan with eleven bastions and three gates, each fitted with a drawbridge, were built by the Venetians, who ruled the island Cyprus from 1489 to 1571. Conceived by Giulio Savorgano, the work began in 1567 and was hardly completed when the Turks laid siege to Nicosia in 1570. Today the massive high walls and the admirable heart-shaped bastions stand as an amazing example of medieval military engineering. The 11 bastions received the names of Venetian governors and generals: Mula, Quirini, Barbaro, Loredano, Flatro, Caraffa, Podocataro, Costanza, D’Avila, Tripoli and Roccas. The gates were named Porta di San Domenico (now Paphos Gate), Porta del Provveditore (Kyrenia gate) and Porta Giuliana (Famagusta gate). Most of the stones used for the construction of the Venetian walls were taken from an older wall, done during the French crusaders’ rule, from 1191 to 1489, larger but less resistant then necessary. Venetians destroyed every monument, monastery, church and tree around the new wall perimeter, a sort of scorched earth policy against the Turks that supplied the needed material; the course of the river Pedieos was also diverted to flow outside the new walls. After the capture of Nicosia, on the 51st day of the siege, the Turks finished the walls, covering the upper parts of the walls with stones to their full height and building parapets on the bastions for the protection of the batteries. Along centuries, Nicosia was invaded, looted, plundered and bombarded several times, damaged by severe earthquakes, to the extent that with the exception of the few existing ancient monuments, the rest of the imposing building have either been destroyed or fallen into ruin. Cypriots use to say that if you dig 50 cm to plant a tree you’ll find a piece of a relique or open an new archeological site but the restored Venetian walls are still there. As part of his recent history, unfortunately, since 1974, after a long civil war that began in 1963, from a severe intercommunal fighting, the United Nations keeps a buffer zone (the ‘Green line’) between Southern and Northern Cyprus: a rusting barricade of barbed wire and oil barrels guarded by Greek Cypriots and Turkish troops in opposite sides, cutting the Venetian wall from east to west. Half of the old city, including 5 of 11 bastions situates in the Turkish occupied zone: North Cyprus. Other 5 bastions remain in South Nicosia, the capital of Republic of Cyprus, which sovereignty is recognized by the European Union. The 11th bastion, named Flatro, remain inside the UN Green Line, the destroyed no man’s land separating the 2 countries. In spite of the ‘Master plan’ implemented in October 2001, to help restore the historic heart of Nicosia — the city inside the Venetian walls — on both side of the Green Line, the buffer zone remains untouched and a crossing wall still cuts the original circular shape of the wall. In both sides, buildings near the Green Line bore the signs of the struggle in their poor state of repair and general lack of usage and upkeep. Comparing the Venetian walls to a beautiful tattoo drawn onto the vast Nicosia’s urban tissue, the wall that divides the 2 countries would be a kind of scar crossing this tattoo. Nowadays there is a certain ‘schizophrenia’ between the touristic map proposed by the Master Plan and the real circuit on the urban landscape because the map shown on the streets is the map of both past and future: the medieval design and the desired city, with no borders and no checkpoints. This map doesn’t reflect the actual urban and politic realities. Therefore, Venetian tour scrapbook proposes a poetic way of overcoming the politic barrier/border between the two countries and rescue, if not the fluidity of the trajectory on the landscape, at least the sensation of continuity and visual fluidity, reconnecting the segments, interrupted by the war. The project is based on the photographic documentation of a touristic walk around the historical center, done in November 2009, when I tried to see and recognize the 11 bastions that punctuate the Venetian walls. During the visit to Flatro (the bastion that nowadays is located inside the Green line) and to the streets inside the buffer zone I was escorted by 2 UN soldiers. The digital collage book/album is divided in 3 parts which, when opened and tied between themselves, become a paper sculpture, star-shaped. The book will have an edition of 10 + 2 a.p. but each edition will be done only by order. Nicosia’s venitian walls: . perimeter approx. 4.8 km (3 English miles) . original height approx.12 m (40 ft) . original width of the rampart approx. 5.6 m (18 ft) . distance from tip to tip of opposite bastions 1.6 km (1 Engl mile) . diameter of the circular walls, excluding bastions 1402 m (4,600 ft) . circumference of the circular walls, excluding bastions 3200 m (2 Engl miles) . area within walls, excluding bastions 1415 km2 (0,585 sq.miles) (374 acres or 1,122 donums) . perimeter of a heart-shaped bastion wall] 347.45 m (380 yds) . average area of each bastion (2 ½ acres or 7 ½ donums) 10000 m2 (106,700 sq.ft) . length of one curtain wall (straight wall between 2 bastions) 275 m (300 yds) . area of walled city (401 acres or 1,203 donums) 1.63 km2 (0.63 sq.miles) including walls and bastions but excluding the moat

Experience of cinema, 2004-2005

photographic projection on smoke Rosângela Rennó’s tentative project, ‘Experiencing Cinema’, was short-listed and selected by Peter Doroshenko, one of the founding directors of inova at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and current head of SMAK in Ghent, Belgium, and Eva Wittcox, for a project room in ARCO 05. According to the artist, "'Experiencing Cinema' comprises the intermittent projection of photographs onto a volatile screen, that is, a smoke curtain, which only appears for a few seconds, deforming, distorting, bringing thickness and movement to static images. Smoke and images simultaneously appear and disappear, prompting a feeling that the image is the effect of an ephemeral materiality – or almost immateriality – of the curtain. This work pays homage to the illusionists and creators of moving image. 'Experiencing Cinema' was conceived as an experiment in the archeology of cinema and particularly refers to the first voyages of image, produced with elementary projectors and magic lanterns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries". The ethereal, ghostlike images that appear projected onto a thin, shifting curtain of smoke, prompt Massimo Tortelli’s words in Figuras do Espanto: photography is that marvellous art that transforms a ray of light into a magic pen which clenches the physiognomy of those dear, to the friend long lost, with ineffaceable signs; that pious art that preserves the comforting images of those who have left us, brought back to life with their sincerest gaze and the very light their eyes once reflected (Frade, Pedro Miguel, “Os Limites de uma Perturbação”: Asa, Lisbon). Rosângela recovers the power photography has of challenging the inexorable and relentless passage of time, which her work consistently addresses, with the immortal image. Whereas time dissolves and dissipates memory, like a cloud of smoke with a gust of wind, photography maintains the ghostly shadow whenever substance has already vanished. Rosângela Rennó's installation re-enacts the profoundly moving experience and surprise of the first viewers of photography, with her restaging of the art of phantasmagoria. According to Pedro Miguel Frade, in his poignant text 'Os Limites de uma Perturbação', photography establishes a regime of proximity with relation to the remote by means of a multifaceted process whereby the object is substituted with its image, or the subtle confusion between the person and his or her effigy, confusion such that also takes the light reflected by the sitter in, retaining and fixing images which do not belong to the sitters themselves, but are always somehow theirs.

Experience of cinema, 2004-2005

Daily Mirror, 1991 - 2001

Video installation double channel Espelho Diário is a video installation project constituted by image and sound of the artist’s performance as a fictitious character called Rosângela, who uses the domestic video camera as a private diary. The original monologue that has been used as a basis for the screenplay of Espelho Diário was written by Alicia Duarte Penna, from a “collage diary” – previously organized by the artist, according to a specific chronology – constituted by texts from Brazilian newspapers. These journalistic texts, collected between 92 and 98, depict/narrate facts that happened to several women who have in common the name Rosângela. Rosângela is one of the most popular names in Brazil, ordinary in the lowest classes, frequently visiting the last pages of Brazilian newspapers. In formal terms, the diary is compound by the sequential collage of texts that have been inserted in the correspondent date (day and month) of the publication in the newspaper, discarding the year of publication. From the 1st of January until 30th of December, there are 133 short narratives filling 109 days in a year of this impossible character, regulated by the fragmentation, non-linearity and multiplicity. The unity of this character is given by the performance of the homonymous artist. Alícia Penna has been invited to be a kind of ghost-writer of this inexistent being to allow the artist to keep a certain “ethic distance” from all women who carry the same name. Performed by an “amateur actress” –nonetheless to say – the video project plays with the idea of the “fake self-referential” artwork and points out the impossibility of identification between the artist and her homonymous. The narratives are splitted in 2 screens in 90 degrees angle: an image and its reflection. In some days of the diary the spectator watches 2 levels of the same drama: on the right, the facts and, on the left, the analysis or the thoughts. Sometimes two Rosângelas are talking, placed in different screens and other times just the scenery is splitted and the character is isolated in one of the screens.

Vera Cruz, 2000

video monchannel At 1500 AD, the unique possible documentation of the Brazil’s discovery moment should have been a drawing or a textual report. No iconographic document survived until our times, if one actually existed. On the other hand, there are three textual reports and the most important and complete between them was written as a letter addressed to King Manuel I of Portugal announcing the discovery of a new “Eden”, signed by Pero Vaz de Caminha. The document frustrates our senses because, in spite of the richness on the details about the ten days lived by the author on the cost of the “Vera Cruz island”, it is only based on the discoverer’s perception. We feel the absence of answer and reaction of the Others – that Edenic human beings so different from the European conquerors. The dialogue between Portuguese and Amerindians however was impossible, due to obvious reasons. The absence of spoken dialogue provokes in the letter’s reader the will for guessing and “imagining” the corporal dialogue – an action hard to be textually transcribed, even when well detailed. As many “impossibilities” could only engender a work based on “impossibilities”. The impossibility of dialogue between Portuguese and Indians enters in tune with the impossibility of the existence of image and sound that could constitute a documentary. However, if everything is possible in the fiction, we have to see and listen to believe. Therefore VERA CRUZ is a videotape of an “(im)possible film” that oscillates between fiction and documentary. From the subtracted image we only see the “film image”, old, scratched and abraded by the 500 years of existence and excessive usage. The sound of the words has always been subtracted because the actual dialogue between the discoverer and the native never happened. Only the sound of the sea and wind remained, witnessing the event. Then, only the report remained, transformed in sub-titles. Thus, VERA CRUZ is the documentary/fiction video/film of the very moment of Brazil’s discovery, in it’s Portuguese sub-titled version. Also available in English.

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. ROSÂNGELA RENNÓ