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Laser-cut 2mm polished mirrored stainless steel
Photo VermelhoIn Celestial Bodies, concentric circles corresponding to each letter of the alphabet were cut into mirrored metal surfaces according to the size of each letter in the name of each star from the three constellations included in the exhibition. These cuts were layered at 60° angles, bringing a threedimensional spherical form and movement to the compositions.



Ø 66,6 cm
Laser-cut 2mm polished mirrored stainless steel
Photo VermelhoIn Celestial Bodies, concentric circles corresponding to each letter of the alphabet were cut into mirrored metal surfaces according to the size of each letter in the name of each star from the three constellations included in the exhibition. These cuts were layered at 60° angles, bringing a threedimensional spherical form and movement to the compositions.

set of 5 pieces with variable dimensions
Laser-cut 2mm polished mirrored stainless steel
Photo Filipe BerndtIn Celestial Bodies, concentric circles corresponding to each letter of the alphabet were cut into mirrored metal surfaces according to the size of each letter in the name of each star from the three constellations included in the exhibition. These cuts were layered at 60° angles, bringing a threedimensional spherical form and movement to the compositions.

42,5 x 42,5 x 4 cm
Printed with mineral pigment ink on Hahnemüehle Photo Rag 308 gr paper and laser-engraved acrylic
Photo VermelhoIn 2004, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, in collaboration with Czech artist Jiri Skala, transformed the familiar Helvetica typeface into a new font they called Helvetica Concentrated, turning it into a series of dots; the size of each dot corresponds to the area of the original individual haracter.
For the series Name of the Stars, the Brazilian artists used their invention to write the names of 287 stars listed in the Yale University Observatory’s Bright Star Catalogue. By overlaying the dot shaped letters (each individual dot has a brightness of 25 percent white), Detanico and Lain create images of the stars. Each has different saturation of light because of the different combination of characters in a given name; the brightest star is the one with the longest name and the darkest the one with the shortest.

60 x 60 cm
4 modified wall clocks
Photo VermelhoFour round clocks, with hands positioned at right angles, create a square within circles. The piece’s lean geometry establishes associations with time zones as temporal spaces and makes a subtle reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, “Perfect Lovers.”

Site-specific
installation at Fort Saint-Jean
Photo courtesy artistBetween word and image, LUMIERE is a piece that plays with its unique location, visible from the city and sea, as well as experienced during a visit to Mucem.
Seen from afar, an image of the sky takes its place in the city skyline. A few clouds float on a blue background surrounding the sun, the brightest point of the composition that echoes the ancient lighthouse.
Seen up close from Mucem, the image reveals its complex composition: a multitude of letters that combine like atoms to endlessly write the word light.

variable dimensions
stacked tiles
Photo Filipe BerndtThe work Pilha, by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, introduces a writing system based on stacking identical objects, which represent letters of the alphabet. Using bricks, erasers, wooden boxes, and sugar cubes, the artists create “texts” arranged in the gallery space. To understand the phrases, one must decipher the code created by them. The piece does not disregard traditional writing but reinterprets it, offering a new way of seeing and interpreting everyday objects.

150 x 250 cm
acrylic varnish, acrylic plaster on raw linen
Photo Filipe BerndtIn Terra Incognita (2022), the title of the work appears written in acrylic over linen canvas, using the Timezonetype system, developed by Detanico Lain. Timezonetype is a typography created from the relationship between time zones and the letters of the alphabet. Portions of the map cut by the time zone are used to designate letters. By this way, words are written with pieces of maps, creating arrangements that break the cartographic order and propose new readings of the world based on the written word.

105 x 190 cm
Pigment print on kozo awagami paper 110g
Photo Filipe BerndtIn the series Clouds (2022), Detanico Lain created a set of 15 images of white clouds on a blue background. From a distance, the observer can, as in a game, look for shapes in the clouds, but when getting closer, he sees that, in fact, the clouds are made of letters that form words. The letters scattered across the images also require some investigation to uncover the word that is there.



270 x 275 cm
charcoal on wall
Photo Filipe BerndtIn the series Metamorphoses, Detanico and Lain create from the work of the same title by the Latin poet Ovid, narrating episodes lived by characters from Greek mythology and the transformations that give the book its name: men who transform themselves into rivers, flowers and rocks; nymphs that are transformed into sounds; gods that transform themselves into birds. Each work in the series narrates one of these transformations.


150 x 83 cm each
pigment print on kozo awagami paper 110g
Photo Filipe BerndtCorpos verdes (2022) [Green bodies] is a poem in 14 images written in Biotipo, a writing system based on images of the artists’ bodies. Detanico and Lain photographed themselves and cut out parts of their bodies to designate with images each of the letters in the alphabet. The system is divided into different shades of green, defining the order in which the overlapping words should be read, from darkest to lightest. The deformations of these body segments are reminiscent of images of foliage. The poem speaks of a body in constant metamorphosis between the world, the word and nature.

Variable dimensions
acrylic paint on wall
Photo Filipe BerndtOn the gallery’s façade, the work that lends it´s title to the exhibition creates a vertical horizon. At the meeting of the two sentences, a division inverting the reading creates a horizontal cut that imposes itself as a border guiding the field of linguistic investigation at the exhibition.

110 x 110 cm
Mineral pigment Epson Ultrachrome print on Koxo Awagami 110g paper
Photo Filipe BerndtDrawing from the insights of semiotics and the natural sciences, Detanico and Lain’s approach to mapping and coding is nonetheless never simply scientific. In an excersice of translation of a japanese garden landscape, Detanico and Lain transform an image into a bitmap and that into pixels wich are patiently replaced by letters – to each pixel a letter – that slowly compose the message: Dreams.

42'2"
video – no color, no sound
Photo video still

101 x 79 cm
dress – suede wool, cotton tricoline, horsetail interlining and plastic
Photo Eduardo Ortega
677 x 994 cm
gold leafed oak
Photo courtesy artistFrom Vermeer to Veronese is a permanent installation commissioned by the Musée du Louvre for its new Conservation Center located in Liévin, France. The work is a conceptual portrait of the museum’s collection.
A structure as large as The Wedding of Cana by Veronese, the largest painting in the collection, provides the overall frame in which smaller formats are assembled. The varied shapes corresponding to different paintings from the collection are juxtaposed to fully cover the 677 x 994 cm area delimited by the huge Veronese.
The composition of decreasing frame dimensions culminates in The Lacemaker, Vermeer’s 24 x 21 cm tiny masterpiece. The author’s name, title, and year of the paintings are engraved on the structures that materialize their dimensions.
The piece is composed of 109 works, representing the number of years between the creation of The Wedding of Cana (1562) and The Lacemaker (1670).

677 x 994 cm
gold leafed oak
Photo courtesy artistFrom Vermeer to Veronese is a permanent installation commissioned by the Musée du Louvre for its new Conservation Center located in Liévin, France. The work is a conceptual portrait of the museum’s collection.
A structure as large as The Wedding of Cana by Veronese, the largest painting in the collection, provides the overall frame in which smaller formats are assembled. The varied shapes corresponding to different paintings from the collection are juxtaposed to fully cover the 677 x 994 cm area delimited by the huge Veronese.
The composition of decreasing frame dimensions culminates in The Lacemaker, Vermeer’s 24 x 21 cm tiny masterpiece. The author’s name, title, and year of the paintings are engraved on the structures that materialize their dimensions.
The piece is composed of 109 works, representing the number of years between the creation of The Wedding of Cana (1562) and The Lacemaker (1670).

150 x 150 cm
Gold leaf glued on ultra MDF board
Photo Edouard FraipontIn the Radiante system, the word sun is written in different languages, according to a graph that simulates the sun’s rays and that, for each quadrant,the artists assign a letter. Each module/ letteris reproduced in goldplated wood, Nar is the word for sun in Mongolian

90 x 150 cm
22k gold leaf, shellac varnish and ethyl alcohol on MDF
Photo VermelhoIn the Radiante system, the word sun is written in different languages, according to a graph that simulates the sun’s rays and that, for each quadrant,the artists assign a letter. Each module/ letteris reproduced in goldplated wood,. Kuara is the word for sun in tupi-guarani.


550 x 350 x 175 cm | 528 x 220 x 320 cm
Steel and led lights
Photo VermelhoIn this work, the distance between the constellations of Perseus and Andromeda is materialized to the scale 1 cm = one light year.


Variable dimensions
4 glass vases and 36 flowers
Photo Filipe BerndtExiting the room toward the second floor of the gallery, there are works from the series Vanitas (2018). In this series, words that refer to the passage of time are written with the Vanitas writing system, in which each letter of the alphabet is designated by a certain number of flowers within vases. A vase with one flower corresponds to the letter A, a vase with two flowers to the letter B, and so on. The exhibition features two works from the Vanitas series: Vida, written with red anthuriums, and Tempo, written with white carnations. Here, real nature (flowers) and conventional nature (time) meet under a single perspective.
This crossing still leaves the doubt: when is the right time to change the flowers in the vases?


23 x 16 cm each part of 10
digital printing on 170 gr olin blanc naturel paper
Photo Filipe BerndtHorizonte do Sertão [Wilderness’ horizon] (2018) shows a horizontal line emanating from the presence of the word ‘horizon’ in the book Grande sertão: veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa. In this series of works, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain search for the word ‘horizon’ in a particular book, scan its pages and erase all the lines of text, leaving only those in which ‘horizon’ is written. After reprinting the full-size pages, the artists organize the montage by profiling the lines of text and creating a horizon of words. The number of parts that make up each work is given by the number of lines with the word ‘horizon’ in each book.


Performer – Megumi Matsumoto
Poem – Kitasono Katué
Projection – Detanico Lain
The works of Detanico and Lain explore the transcoding of systems that represent the world, such as language and graphic notation. They combine various media, including video, sound, text, typography, drawing, and sculpture, creating dialogues between different forms of expression and challenging how we perceive and interpret information in everyday life.


73 x 58,7 cm
Mineral printing with pigmented ink on Awagami Kozo Thick Natural cotton 110 gr paper
Photo Edouard FraipontIn the series 27 rue de Fleurus, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain used the Cubica [Cubic] system, developed by them, to rewrite poems from the book Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. The artists then applied chromatic splotches to the compositions based on paintings in the art collection of Stein, whose residence was located at 27 Fleurus street, in Paris.

100 x 81,3 cm
Mineral printing with pigmented ink on Awagami Kozo Thick Natural cotton 110 gr paper
Photo Edouard FraipontIn the series 27 rue de Fleurus, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain used the Cubica [Cubic] system, developed by them, to rewrite poems from the book Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. The artists then applied chromatic splotches to the compositions based on paintings in the art collection of Stein, whose residence was located at 27 Fleurus street, in Paris.

140,3 x 92,1 cm
Mineral printing with pigmented ink on Awagami Kozo Thick Natural cotton 110 gr paper
Photo Edouard FraipontIn the series 27 rue de Fleurus, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain used the Cubica [Cubic] system, developed by them, to rewrite poems from the book Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. The artists then applied chromatic splotches to the compositions based on paintings in the art collection of Stein, whose residence was located at 27 Fleurus street, in Paris.

64 x 64 x 4 cm
Pigmented mineral print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag matte paper 100% white cotton 308g
Photo Ana PigossoIn the Quanta cor series, color names are described using a diagrammatic accumulation system. Color fields are drawn by crossing the positions of each letter in the color name and in alphabetical order. The color is formed as the letters combine. The word is completed as the layers of pigments overlap.

64 x 64 x 4 cm cada
Pigmented mineral print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag matte paper 100% white cotton 308g
Photo Ana PigossoIn the Quanta cor series, color names are described using a diagrammatic accumulation system. Color fields are drawn by crossing the positions of each letter in the color name and in alphabetical order. The color is formed as the letters combine. The word is completed as the layers of pigments overlap.

64 x 64 x 4 cm each
mineral inkjet on Hähnemühle Photo Rag matte 100% white cotton
Photo Ana PigossoIn the Quanta cor series, color names are described using a diagrammatic accumulation system. Color fields are drawn by crossing the positions of each letter in the color name and in alphabetical order. The color is formed as the letters combine. The word is completed as the layers of pigments overlap.

110 x 110 cm
4 wall mounted clocks
Photo VermelhoFour round clocks, with their hands set at right angles, create a square within circles. The lean geometry of the piece is offset with various associations, like time zones, as well as a subtle reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ classic work “Perfect Lovers”.

72 x 263 x 4 cm
fluorescent lamps
Photo Vermelho
250 x 250 cm
vinyl cut on wall
Photo courtesy artistIn Kallistos Kosmos, from Léxico series Angela Detanico and Rafel Lain transform the stars of the sky into Greek letters. The alpha-stars are the most luminous, all the way to the faintest omega-stars. They used this new map to draw new constellations, here, by writing Heracleitos’ phrase “Kallistos Kosmos”, the best of worlds.

7 x 8 m
Carbon steel, oxide red anti-corrosive background paint and matte black alkyd synthetic enamel, led lamps and resin
Photo courtesy artistVizinhança [Neighborhood] is a permanent installation in the city of Caxias do Sul, homeland of the artists where are represented in three dimensions the 30 nearest stars of the earth (scale 1 meter = 1 parsec [3.25 light years]).

80 x 60 cm each - polyptych composed of 24 pieces
Printing with mineral pigment ink on paper Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gr.
Detanico and Lain Testimony: “It is a 24-frame version of the history of the universe, from its initial extremely dense and concentrated state to its end, where the particles will be so dispersed that there will be no more light or form. In the book of the universe the stars visible in the sky of the southern hemisphere are represented by Greek letters corresponding to their magnitude on the Bayer scale (alpha for the brightest, followed by beta, gamma, etc… to omega for the less bright). This set of elements turns the sky into a book, in which the combinations of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet can write all the possible stories of the universe.”
– Detanico Lain


variable dimensions
320 pavement tiles
Photo Leif GabrielsenSATOR AREP TENET OPERA ROTAS written with the Pilha writing system created by the duo Detanico and Lain.
The oldest palindrome in the world is the Latin phrase “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas”, which means “The diligent farmer knows the route of the plow” and was created between the 2nd and 5th centuries, according to researchers’ estimates. The Sator square is a structure in the shape of a magic square that contains the five Latin words.

7 hours video + 80 x 100 cm prints (each part of 7)
Double projection, B&W, sound, prints on paper
Photo Rafael CañasIn Room 2, Detanico and Lain are presenting the animation Horizonte de ondas (um e dois meios) [Wave Horizon (One and Two Mediums)] (2012) composed of B&W projections and a printed musical score. The work combines geometric shapes and sinusoidal sound waves, whose image is similar to the movement of ocean, sound and light waves. In the installation, eight bands of graphic and sonic elements glide in the field of the image, creating a horizon in move-ment. Each band is composed of three elements ( /\ \ / ) corresponding to the behavior of the waves. The nearer bands glide faster and have a higher-pitched sound; the more distant ones glide more slowly and are lower pitched. The com-bination of these elements constructs a geometric landscape of sound waves. The projection is accompanied by a map that describes the structure of the composition as a palindrome, that is, it can be read from right to left or from left to right.

25 x 79 cm
black adhesive vinyl cut on white wall
Photo reproductionIn Palavras Compostas (2012), words with opposite meanings, such as yes/no, always/never, or full/empty, are positioned in a such a way as to constitute a single pattern. To do this, the duo uses the upper half of each word and positions it precisely above its opposite, creating an abstract pattern made of antonyms.

408 x 118 cm
5 mm thick laser cut stainless steel
Photo Rafael CañasComposed of circular stainless steel cutouts laid atop one another on the floor of the exhibition space, the installation Pulsar (2012) was created based on the Amplitude (2012) typography, which assigns each letter of the alphabet to a determined number of circles. The circles accumulate in geometric progression from A to Z; for example, the word “Pulsar” is made with 16 circles for the letter P, 21 for U, 12 for L, 19 for S, 1 for A and 18 for R.


Variable dimensions
Acrylic paint on wall
Photo Rafael CañasThe series Palavras Compostas (2012) is present all over the exhibition. In it, words with opposite meanings, such as yes/no, always/never, or full/empty, are positioned in a such a way as to constitute a single pattern. To do this, the duo uses the upper half of each word and positions it precisely above its opposite, creating an abstract pattern made of antonyms. On the gallery’s façade, the attentive observer can read “dentro/fora” [inside/outside], a choice that points to not only the transitoriness of every word but also to that of space as a whole.

720' loop
Animation, B&W, no sound
Photo video stillIn Timewaves, words appear and disappear over time. Clock-like movements break the syntax of a page from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves thus creating new readings. The work shows the hours of the place where it is displayed from the opening text of each of the 9 interludes from Woolf’s book, that occur from the dawn to dusk of a day.
Appropriating Woolf’s text, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain provoke the viewer to decipher new codes coming from the verbal language. Form and meaning require time and attention from the observer, who becomes an accomplice in the construction of the work.

32 x 65 cm
cut black adhesive vinyl
Photo reproductionIn Palavras Compostas (2012), words with opposite meanings, such as yes/no, always/never, or full/empty, are positioned in a such a way as to constitute a single pattern. To do this, the duo uses the upper half of each word and positions it precisely above its opposite, creating an abstract pattern made of antonyms.

200 x 400 cm
Text set in Wafe form and salt
Photo courtesy artistThe work of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain recodifies symbols and plays with the representations of culture, using different systems of language and extrapolating codes to create new means of communication. These new forms of communication help us imagine a topology of visual language.
Using letters, numbers, and symbols, they create databases, comparisons, and diagrams that are materialized in formats ranging from sculpture and graphic art to animation and videos. The visual language they produce serves as a tool for reading and deciphering social, cultural, and scientific codes.

87 x 66,7 x 4 cm
Silkscreen printing on Canson edition 250g paper
Photo reproduction Sobre cor [On Colour] combines five typographies developed by the artists and texts, concepts and theories about color by five different authors.
In the screen prints, concepts and theories about color taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein [Remarks on Colour], Goethe [Theory of Colour], Maxwell [Experiments on Colour, the Perceived by the eye], Isaac Newton [ Optiks] and Aristotle [De Sensu et sensibilia], are combined with Helvética Concentrated, Polígona Equilátera, Roseta, Retícula and Linear.
The different lines are expressed in primary colors, cyan, magenta and yellow, and come in different shapes according to the typography used, either through the succession of polygons with increasing number of sides equivalent to the alphabetical order of the triangle A icosioctágono equilateral Z in Polígona Equilátera; on the alphabet formed by growing radial lines starting from the center of each letter in Roseta, in a plot scale of intensity, with gradual values from A to Z in Retícula; on parallel lines equal to their position in alphabetical order in Linear, or on the different disk sizes determined by different shape of the letters in Helvetica Concentrated.
The voices of Wittgenstein, Goethe, Maxwell, Newton and Aristotle combined with Detanico Lain typographies present 60 dialogues on color.

87 x 66,7 x 4 cm
Silkscreen printing on Canson edition 250g paper
Photo reproduction Sobre cor [On Colour] combines five typographies developed by the artists and texts, concepts and theories about color by five different authors.
In the screen prints, concepts and theories about color taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein [Remarks on Colour], Goethe [Theory of Colour], Maxwell [Experiments on Colour, the Perceived by the eye], Isaac Newton [ Optiks] and Aristotle [De Sensu et sensibilia], are combined with Helvética Concentrated, Polígona Equilátera, Roseta, Retícula and Linear.
The different lines are expressed in primary colors, cyan, magenta and yellow, and come in different shapes according to the typography used, either through the succession of polygons with increasing number of sides equivalent to the alphabetical order of the triangle A icosioctágono equilateral Z in Polígona Equilátera; on the alphabet formed by growing radial lines starting from the center of each letter in Roseta, in a plot scale of intensity, with gradual values from A to Z in Retícula; on parallel lines equal to their position in alphabetical order in Linear, or on the different disk sizes determined by different shape of the letters in Helvetica Concentrated.
The voices of Wittgenstein, Goethe, Maxwell, Newton and Aristotle combined with Detanico Lain typographies present 60 dialogues on color.

87 x 66,7 x 4 cm
Silkscreen printing on Canson edition 250g paper
Photo reproduction Sobre cor [On Colour] combines five typographies developed by the artists and texts, concepts and theories about color by five different authors.
In the screen prints, concepts and theories about color taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein [Remarks on Colour], Goethe [Theory of Colour], Maxwell [Experiments on Colour, the Perceived by the eye], Isaac Newton [ Optiks] and Aristotle [De Sensu et sensibilia], are combined with Helvética Concentrated, Polígona Equilátera, Roseta, Retícula and Linear.
The different lines are expressed in primary colors, cyan, magenta and yellow, and come in different shapes according to the typography used, either through the succession of polygons with increasing number of sides equivalent to the alphabetical order of the triangle A icosioctágono equilateral Z in Polígona Equilátera; on the alphabet formed by growing radial lines starting from the center of each letter in Roseta, in a plot scale of intensity, with gradual values from A to Z in Retícula; on parallel lines equal to their position in alphabetical order in Linear, or on the different disk sizes determined by different shape of the letters in Helvetica Concentrated.
The voices of Wittgenstein, Goethe, Maxwell, Newton and Aristotle combined with Detanico Lain typographies present 60 dialogues on color.


162 x 32 cm | 178 x 32 cm | 167 x 40 cm
serigrafia em aço inox
Photo Edouard FraipontThe letters from A to Z are engraved in stainless steel rulers. Several rules are presented side by side. The misalignment of rules creates a alignment of letters, making possible to read words or senteces.

43 x 233 cm
108 books stacked, “Words and Things” – Michel Foucault
Photo Rafael CanasThe work Pilha, by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, introduces a writing system based on stacking identical objects, which represent letters of the alphabet. Using bricks, erasers, wooden boxes, and sugar cubes, the artists create “texts” arranged in the gallery space. To understand the phrases, one must decipher the code created by them. The piece does not disregard traditional writing but reinterprets it, offering a new way of seeing and interpreting everyday objects.

site specifc
permanent light installation
Photo KleinefennThe Ring of Fire is an imaginary line that links the numerous volcanoes that bound the Pacific Ocean. This line follows, for the most part, the edge of the Pacific tectonic plate. The most intense seismic activity in the world is found in the vicinity of this line, with a number of subaerial volcanoes in excess of four hundred.
This line measures 40,000 kilometers, which is equivalent to the circumference of the Earth.
Via a principle of projection onto a flat surface and scaling, this line is transposed onto the facade of the building of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.
The building is thus girdled by a line of neon lights, attached to the stone of its four facades in the same way that the Ring of Fire circles the globe.

variable dimensions
adhesive vinyl and 365 postcards in acrylic box
Photo Ding MusaIn astronomy, an analemma is an image resulting from a photographic documentation of the sun’s movement in the sky throughout a year, always regarding a specific time of the day. Analema also the title of the installation where Detanico Lain repeat the trace of the sun and replace it for a sentence formed by 365 letters applied upon one the walls. The same concept reappears in Ano Solar (Solar Year) a calendar composed of 365 postcards that repeat the letters of Analema sentence and the position of the sun in the southern hemisphere.



variable dimensions
matte black adhesive vinyl and matte black acrylic paint
Photo Ding MusaFor the Univers installation, Detanico Lain employed the Univers type font, which was developed by Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger in 1954. According to the artists, the Univers font inflects functionalist ideas present in graphic design production of the first half of the 20th century. It was believed at the time that simplicity in typography would determine a more efficient access to the message. To those elements Detanico Lain added the Big Bang theory or the constant expansion of the universe. By gathering the typographic font and the constant expanding universe, the Univers wall painting rose, where fragments of words are painted on a black surface of one of the walls in Vermelho’s hall 1. At the opposite wall, the artists present the word correctly configured, what suggests the constant movement of the expanding universe.

variable dimensions
white adhesive vinyl over black acrylic paint
Photo Vermelho
variable dimensions
text composed in Ventania – projection, video, animation, color
Photo reproductionSomething Crossing (2008) shows a text composed in Ventania – an alphabet derived from a system for notation of wind intensity – that is animated according to wind directions observed everyday at some point in central Atlantic Ocean.

14'
sound installation and animation
Photo VermelhoWind Spelling (2008) is a sound piece in which names of south winds are spelled at a sound scale created from the speed decrease of a human blowing. The highest and shortest note stands for the letter A and the longest and lowest note stands for the letter Z. These sounds/letters are overlapped and combined to pronounce names such as Elephanta, Minuano and Sirocco.

Variable dimensions
stacked bricks
Photo Edouard FraipontThe work Pilha, by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, introduces a writing system based on stacking identical objects, which represent letters of the alphabet. Using bricks, erasers, wooden boxes, and sugar cubes, the artists create “texts” arranged in the gallery space. To understand the phrases, one must decipher the code created by them. The piece does not disregard traditional writing but reinterprets it, offering a new way of seeing and interpreting everyday objects.


255 x 150 cm diameter
Electrostatic painting and adhesive vinyl on metal
Photo courtesy artistThe works of Detanico and Lain explore the transcoding of systems that represent the world, such as language and graphic notation. They combine various media, including video, sound, text, typography, drawing, and sculpture, creating dialogues between different forms of expression and challenging how we perceive and interpret information in everyday life.


72 x 97 cm
Printing with pigmented mineral ink on Hahnemüehle Fine Art Pearl 250 gr paper
Photo reproductionIn Local time, Detanico and Lain propose a correspondence between letters of the alphabet and global time zone system. In order to create it, the duo started from studies by North-American astronomist and mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), who used alphabet letters to identify the 24 time zones on earth.

13´´ loop + 123 x 177 cm + 16 x 20 cm
video animation and photography in Lambda printing
Photo Ding MusaSamuel Morse (1791-1872), inventor of the telegraph and Morse code, was a painter until he was 46 years old. In 1831, he traveled to Paris, where he painted the masterpieces of the Louvre Museum’s collection with the aim of presenting them to the American public. Gallery of the Louvre was his last attempt to create a great work. Failing to gain the recognition he hoped for, Morse abandoned painting to dedicate himself entirely to the development of his inventions.

60 x 90 cm
printed on alluminium foil
Photo reproductionIn 2004, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, in collaboration with Czech artist Jiří Skála, created the Helvetica Concentrated writing system. Based on the Helvetica typeface designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger, the artists developed a new typeface formed by a series of dots. Each dot corresponds to the mass of the original character. Helvetica was conceived as a neutral, clear typeface with high legibility, free of serifs or intrinsic meanings tied to its form. It became one of the most popular typefaces in history, widely used in various corporate logos. Helvetica Concentrated challenges the legibility of the original typeface with a non-hierarchical sequence of forms. Unlike a geometric progression, where “A” would have the smallest mass and “Z” the largest, the sequence based on each letter’s individual mass generates a rhythmic and random progression of sizes.

42,5 x 42,5 x 4 cm
Inkjet on paper
Photo reproductionIn 2004, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, in collaboration with Czech artist Jiri Skala, transformed the familiar Helvetica typeface into a new font they called Helvetica Concentrated, turning it into a series of dots; the size of each dot corresponds to the area of the original individual haracter.
For the series Name of the Stars, the Brazilian artists used their invention to write the names of 287 stars listed in the Yale University Observatory’s Bright Star Catalogue. By overlaying the dot shaped letters (each individual dot has a brightness of 25 percent white), Detanico and Lain create images of the stars. Each has different saturation of light because of the different combination of characters in a given name; the brightest star is the one with the longest name and the darkest the one with the shortest.


42,5 x 42,5 x 4 cm
Printing with mineral pigment ink on Hahnemüehle Photo Rag paper 308gr and laser engraved acrylic
In 2004, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, in collaboration with Czech artist Jiri Skala, transformed the familiar Helvetica typeface into a new font they called Helvetica Concentrated, turning it into a series of dots; the size of each dot corresponds to the area of the original individual haracter.
For the series Name of the Stars, the Brazilian artists used their invention to write the names of 287 stars listed in the Yale University Observatory’s Bright Star Catalogue. By overlaying the dot shaped letters (each individual dot has a brightness of 25 percent white), Detanico and Lain create images of the stars. Each has different saturation of light because of the different combination of characters in a given name; the brightest star is the one with the longest name and the darkest the one with the shortest.

60 x 90 cm
printed on alluminium foil
Photo reproduction

40'
Choreography: Takeshi Yazaki and Megumi Matsumoto
Images: Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain
Sound: Dennis Mcnulty
The performance Weightless Days is the result of a collaboration between Japanese choreographers and dancers Takeshi Yazaki and Megumi Matsumoto, Brazilian visual artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, and Irish musician Dennis McNulty. In this encounter of different practices and sensibilities, the languages of dance, video, and music come together to create a piece about the passage of time, divided into the seven days of the week—the weightless days.
On a stage created by the presence of light and modulated by its absence, Yazaki and Matsumoto dance over positive and negative forms drawn by the vertical projection of an animation developed by Detanico and Lain. Their movements follow the evolution of light discs, emerge in dark zones, and lean on luminous shapes as if these gained physical form, playing with their own shadows. In this universe of combined dualities, light and dark imply each other like night and day, as do masculine and feminine, harmony and chaos, sleep and wakefulness, or dream and reality, creating different poetic interpretations for the succession of scenes in Weightless Days.
The soundtrack, composed by Dennis McNulty, contributes to the construction of the various atmospheres—or the suspension of gravity—with ambient sounds that weave fragments of everyday life into instrumental compositions of guitars and pianos, alongside electronic sounds.

Variable dimensions
Text written in black with Times New Roman font, on a white background
Photo Adam VackarDetanico Lain’s works transcode systems of representation of the world, such as language and graphic notation, crossing different media, including video, sound, text, typography, drawing and sculpture.

Variable dimensions
wooden stairs
Photo VermelhoThe works of Detanico and Lain explore the transcoding of systems that represent the world, such as language and graphic notation. They combine various media, including video, sound, text, typography, drawing, and sculpture, creating dialogues between different forms of expression and challenging how we perceive and interpret information in everyday life.

77 x 103 cm
poster
Photo courtesy artistIn 1960, Brasília, the new capital city of Brazil, was founded as a symbol of an industrial development era idealized by President Juscelino Kubitschek. This planned city, built up from ground zero in the middle of a desert plateau, would have to reflect the processes of modernization and growth that were transforming Brazilian urban areas. Oscar Niemeyer, who had created projects in Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, was the architect of this futuristic and utopian city.
Utopia is a digital typeface that depicts the landscape of big Brazilian cities today, as it portrays the space sharing of aesthetical and ethical modernist planned elements, and reactions that have grown between their gaps, flaws, and contradictions. The capital letters are characters drawn from views of buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer; the lower case letters are urban actors and objects.

60 x 120 x 20 cm each (polyptych)
4 acrylic light boxes mounted on aluminum chassis
Photo Ding Musa
Site-specific
Photo Vermelho
variable dimensions
stacked rubbers
Photo VermelhoThe work Pilha, by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, introduces a writing system based on stacking identical objects, which represent letters of the alphabet. Using bricks, erasers, wooden boxes, and sugar cubes, the artists create “texts” arranged in the gallery space. To understand the phrases, one must decipher the code created by them. The piece does not disregard traditional writing but reinterprets it, offering a new way of seeing and interpreting everyday objects.

Detanico Lain adopt language as the subject and object of their work. A poetics that presents the world seen from its own codes of perception and understanding. Their largely conceptual works employ the use of sound, graphics, text, video, and other traditional art mediums within their installations. They represent a rigorous use of formalism and a refined use of visual and written poetry.
Their work reflects their joint fascination with the human ability to contemplate the world around them and beyond. Imbued with scientific, mathematical and literary references, their work applies themes of time, space, memory and the infinite beyond.
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have worked together since 1996. Semiologist and graphic designer, born in 1974 and 1973, respectively, in Caxias do Sul (RS), live and work in Paris. Their works, largely conceptual, mix graphics, text, sounds and videos, almost always imbued with scientific, mathematical and literary references.
In 2002, the duo participated in an artist residency in the French capital, at the Palais de Tokyo. Two years later, he won the Nam June Paik, one of the most prestigious international awards. In the same year, in 2004, Angela and Rafael participated in the Bienal de São Paulo, a feat that was repeated in the following two editions, in 2006 and 2008. In 2007, the duo represented Brazil at the 52nd Venice Art Biennale.
A selection of solo shows include Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (2019), The Club, Tokio; Archipel (2018), Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne, Alfabeto Infinito (2013), Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Um dado tempo um dado lugar (2008), Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Inverse Times (2007), Musée Zadkine, Paris; After Utopia (2006), Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia.
A selection of group shows includes: The Moon (2019), Grand Palais, Paris (France); Unpacking My Library (2018), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Greece); Paisagem Incompleta, Centro Cultural Usiminas (2010), Ipatinga (Brazil); Undefined borders for unlimited perceptions (2009), Blindarte Contemporanea, Naples (Italy); 10ª Bienal Habana – Integración y resistencia en la era global (2009), Havana (Cuba); MASH UP, Artspace (2009), Auckland, New Zeland; Volume V – I think I remember (2009), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (Ireland); Programme “Satellite” Terrains de jeux ¾ (2008), Jeu de Paume, Paris (France); Um dado tempo um dado lugar (2008), Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (Brasil); Inverse Times (2007) Musée Zadkine, Paris (France); Detanico, Lain – Optica Centre d’Art Contemporain (2007) Montreal (Canada); 3rd Media City (2004), Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (South Corea).
Their works are part of collections such as Musée du Louvre, Paris (France); FNAC (France); FMAC (France); FRAC île-de-france, Le Plateau, Paris, (France); Musée d’Art modern et Contemporain, Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables d’Olonne, (France); Taguchi Art Collection (Japan); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo (Japan); Centro Calego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain); Cifo-Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (USA); Colección Isabel y Agustin Coppel, CDMX (Mexico); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil); MAMAM, Recife (Brazil); Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, IFF, Ribeirão Preto (Brazil). Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (Brazil).
Detanico Lain adopt language as the subject and object of their work. A poetics that presents the world seen from its own codes of perception and understanding. Their largely conceptual works employ the use of sound, graphics, text, video, and other traditional art mediums within their installations. They represent a rigorous use of formalism and a refined use of visual and written poetry.
Their work reflects their joint fascination with the human ability to contemplate the world around them and beyond. Imbued with scientific, mathematical and literary references, their work applies themes of time, space, memory and the infinite beyond.
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have worked together since 1996. Semiologist and graphic designer, born in 1974 and 1973, respectively, in Caxias do Sul (RS), live and work in Paris. Their works, largely conceptual, mix graphics, text, sounds and videos, almost always imbued with scientific, mathematical and literary references.
In 2002, the duo participated in an artist residency in the French capital, at the Palais de Tokyo. Two years later, he won the Nam June Paik, one of the most prestigious international awards. In the same year, in 2004, Angela and Rafael participated in the Bienal de São Paulo, a feat that was repeated in the following two editions, in 2006 and 2008. In 2007, the duo represented Brazil at the 52nd Venice Art Biennale.
A selection of solo shows include Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (2019), The Club, Tokio; Archipel (2018), Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne, Alfabeto Infinito (2013), Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Um dado tempo um dado lugar (2008), Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Inverse Times (2007), Musée Zadkine, Paris; After Utopia (2006), Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia.
A selection of group shows includes: The Moon (2019), Grand Palais, Paris (France); Unpacking My Library (2018), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Greece); Paisagem Incompleta, Centro Cultural Usiminas (2010), Ipatinga (Brazil); Undefined borders for unlimited perceptions (2009), Blindarte Contemporanea, Naples (Italy); 10ª Bienal Habana – Integración y resistencia en la era global (2009), Havana (Cuba); MASH UP, Artspace (2009), Auckland, New Zeland; Volume V – I think I remember (2009), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (Ireland); Programme “Satellite” Terrains de jeux ¾ (2008), Jeu de Paume, Paris (France); Um dado tempo um dado lugar (2008), Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (Brasil); Inverse Times (2007) Musée Zadkine, Paris (France); Detanico, Lain – Optica Centre d’Art Contemporain (2007) Montreal (Canada); 3rd Media City (2004), Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (South Corea).
Their works are part of collections such as Musée du Louvre, Paris (France); FNAC (France); FMAC (France); FRAC île-de-france, Le Plateau, Paris, (France); Musée d’Art modern et Contemporain, Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables d’Olonne, (France); Taguchi Art Collection (Japan); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo (Japan); Centro Calego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain); Cifo-Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (USA); Colección Isabel y Agustin Coppel, CDMX (Mexico); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil); MAMAM, Recife (Brazil); Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, IFF, Ribeirão Preto (Brazil). Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (Brazil).
- Angela Detanico (1974), Rafael Lain (1973)
Caxias do Sul, Brasil
Live and work in Paris, FranceSolo Exhibitions2025
– Prix Marcel Duchamp – Art Genève – Genebra – Suíça
– Detanico Lain. Sobre o infinito, o universo e os mundos – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2024
– Detanico Lain. Florence Lights Up. Palazzo Vecchio, Sala d’Arme, Florença, Itália
– Detanico Lain. Flowering of Light – Prix Marcel Duchamp 2024 – Centre Pompidou – Paris – França
– Detanico Lain. Replay – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Res Publica – Cité Administrative d’Amiens – Amiens – França (instalação permanente/permanente exhibition)2023
– Jardim de Esculturas – Projeto Marquise – Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM SP) – São Paulo – Brasil
– Detanico Lain. Light Words – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2022
– Detanico Lain. Two Voices – Rozenstraat – Amsterdam – Holanda
– Detanico Lain. Sobre a terra, sob o céu – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Detanico Lain. Danaé – Église Sainte Cécile – Ceillac – França
– Detanico Lain. Lumière – MUCEM – Marselha – França
– Detanico Lain. Corpos Celestes – Vera Cortes – Lisboa – Portugal
– Detanico Lain. Persévérance – LMNO – Bruxelles – Bélgica2021
– Detanico Lain. Perspective – Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-de-France [CRP] – Douchy-les-Mines, França
– Detanico Lain. Solution dúne question curieuse… – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – France2019
– Detanico Lain. Between Yesterday and Tomorrow – The Club – Tóquio – Japão
– De Vermeer à Véronèse [instalação permanente/permanente exhibition]. Centre de Conservation du Louvre à Liévin – Liévin – França
– Detanico Lain. Meteorológica – Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro [ECPS] – São Paulo – Brasil
– Detanico Lain. Time Waves (capítulo II) – Sala Antonio – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo
– Metamorphoses – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2018
– Detanico Lain: Estrutura – Galeria Vera Cortês – Lisboa Portugal
– Detanico Lain: Archipel – Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix – Les Sables-d’Olonne – França2017
– Ao mesmo tempo – Embaixada do Brasil em Tóquio – Japão
– Letter Works – Açik Ekran Gallery – Istambul – Turquia
– Detanico Lain: Oceans – LMNO – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– 27 rue de Fleurus – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2016
– Cascada de Silêncio – Proyecto Paralelo – México D.F. – México
– 12 13 14 15, LMNO – Bruxelas, Bélgica
– Letter Pieces (on the revolutions) – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – France2015
– Sobre o Céu – Vera Cortes Art Agency – Lisboa – Portugal
– Una línea mil palabras — Casas Riegner — Bogotá — Colombia2014
– Comme des gouttes de pluie sur la lune/Like raindrops on the moon – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Weightless Days (Rain Season) – La Gaite Lyrique – Paris – França2013
– Alfabeto Infinito – Fundação Iberê Camargo – Porto Alegre – Brasil
– Weightless Days version Kyoto 2013 — Kyoto Art Center – Quioto – Japão
– Amplitude — Museu Coleção Berardo — Lisboa — Portugal2012
– Le jardin des heures – Les arts au mur – Pessac – France
– Rio Corrente – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Two Voices – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2011
– Lexico – Blindarte Contemporanea – Nápoles – Itália
– Formas de Dizer – Vera Cortês Art Agency – Lisboa –Portugal
– Sobre Cor – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2010
– 179 Canal Façade – 179 Canal, Univers – Nova York – EUA
– Detanico y Lain- Galería Moro- Santiago-Chile
– Horizon Vague -Galerie Martine Aboucaya- Paris – France
– Léxico – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2009
– Espaços de Tempo – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Wind Spelling – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2008
– Il silenzio dell’eclissi – Blindarte Contemporânea – Nápoles – Itália
– 24/25 – Jeu de Paume – Paris – França
– Um dado tempo um dado lugar – Museu de Arte da Pampulha – Belo Horizonte – Brasil2007
– 52ª Biennale di Venezia – Padiglione Brasile – Veneza – Itália
– Inverse Times – Musée Zadkine – Paris – França
– Detanico, Lain – Óptica – Montreal – Canadá
– Novas Utopias – Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães [MAMAM] – Recife – Brasil
– Camberwell College of Arts – Londres – Inglaterra
– Ano Zero – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Equation du temps – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2006
– After Utopia – Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art – Nicosia – Chipre
– Flow/Wolf – La BF15 – Lyon – França2005
– About to say – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – FrançaGroup Exhibitions
2024
– uma cadeira é uma cadeira é uma cadeira – Galeria Luisa Strina – São Paulo – Brasil
– 6th Mardin Biennial – Mardin – Turquia
– Passions partagées – Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MUCEM) – Marseille – France
– Le Silo 7 – Marines – France2023
– Como una llamada a los cuervos en medio del silencio – Museo Vostell Malpartida – Malpartida de Cáceres – Espanha
– Dangerous Contemporary Art Taguchi Art Collection – Takahashi City Nariwa Art Museum – Takahashi – Japão
– Casa no céu – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Apaixonados – Galpão da Lapa – São Paulo – Brasil
– Atlas of Irreversibility – Universidade de Graz – Graz – Áustria2022
– Ausente Manifesto. Ver e imaginar na arte contemporânea – Sesc Araraquara – Araraquara – Brasil
– Monument. 40 ans de photographie au CRP – Centre régional de photographie – Douchy-les-Mines – França
– 15 anos MACE – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas – Elvas – Portugal
– Lunar Maria – Le Silo – Marines – França
– Illusion. Bois de Fa – Grez Doiceau – Bélgica
– Soundtrack for a Troubled Time – Huidenclub – Rotterdam – Netherlands
– Missing – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – France
– À mains nues – MAC VAL – Vitry-sur-Seine – França
– Licenses libre – Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch – Issoudun – França
– Coleção Sartori — A arte contemporânea habita Antônio Prado – Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul [MARGS] – Porto Alegre – Brasil
– Offscreen – Hotel Salomon de Rothschild – Paris – França2021
– Ausente Manifesto: ver e imaginar na arte contemporânea – Sesc Mogi – Mogi das Cruzes – Brasil
– Em Branco – Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz [IFF] – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
– Biennial of the Americas – Museo de las Americas – Denver – EUA
– rosa rosa rosae rosae – Maison Pelgrims – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– The Still Point –Kudan House – Tóquio – Japão
– Outras Habilidades – Museu Casa Kubitschek – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Perdidos. Em Medio. Juntos. 22a Bienal de Arte Paiz – Fundación Nacional para las Bellas Artes y la Cultura – Guatemala
– Les tiroirs du temps de Jacques Roubaud – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2020
– Gráfico Grafia – Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Unfolding Artist`s Mind – The Club – Tóquio – Japão
– En Mouvement – Villa Kujoyama – Quioto – Japão
– Tomber em Amour – Maison des Arts – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– Diálogos – Galeria Vera Cortês – Lisboa – Portugal
– From Translating to Transcoding – Société d’Élecricité – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– Obras-Projeto – Museu Brasilerio da Escultura e Ecologia (MUBE) – São Paulo – Brasil
– Escrituras Ácratas – Centro Párrage – Murcia – Espanha
– Playtime – Casa do Lago – Cidade do México – México
– Oblique Strategies – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– La lenta exploson de uma semilla – OTR Espacio de Arte – Madri – Espanha2019
– Rio dos Navegantes – Museu de Arte do Rio [MAR] – Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
– The Moon – Grand Palais – Paris – França
– One Minute, One Hour, One Month… One Million Years – The Island Club – Limassol – Chipre
– Os olhos escutam – Galeria Fundação Amélia de Mello – Lisboa – Portugal
– Les títres courants – Collections Frac Normandie Caen – Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe – França
– D – collections du Frac Íle-de-France – Chateau de Rentilly – Rentilly – França
– La Rive D’en Face – L’Art Pu Gallery – Riyadh – Arábia Saudita
– The other side of the wind – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Marines – Le Silo – França
– Régénérations – LMNO – Bruxelas – Bélgica2018
– Multitudinous Seas – Fondation Hippocrène – Paris França
– Ready Made in Brasil – SESI Itapetininga – Itapetininga – Brasil
– One Thing Plus Another Thing or One Thing Minus Another Thing. That’s How Stories Begin – Tlön Projects – Amsterdam – Holanda
– Kyojitsu-Hiniku: Between the Skin and the Flesh of Japan -Pavilhão Japonês – Pq do Ibirapuera – São Paulo – Brasil
– Saudosa Maloca – Alameda Campinas, 737 – São Paulo – Brasil
– Tarefas Infinitas – Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin – Cidade Universitária – São Paulo – Brasil
– Another visit with the sculpture – Arte Alameda/ National Institute of Fine Arts – Cidade do México – México
– Oeuvres de la Collection Lambert – Collection Lambert en Avignon – Avignon – França
– Unpacking my library – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) – Atenas – Grécia
– Prologue #1 – Gallerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Playlist – Gallerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– 14e Nuit des Musées – Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature – Paris – França
– #iff2018 – Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (IFF) – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
– Medio Acqua – La Base sous-marine – Bordeaux – França
– Dialogue — The Club — Tóquio — Japão
– À l’heure du dessin, 6ª temps, Tracé – Château de Serviéres – Marselha – França2017
– Manipulate the World – Moderna Museet – Estocolmo – Suécia
– Flatland / Abstractions narratives #2 – MUDAM Luxembourg – Luxembourg
– Nuit Blanche Kyoto – MTRL Kyoto – Quioto – Japão
– Viva Villa! Festival – Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris – França
– Potência e Adversidade. Arte da América Latina nas coleções em Portugal – Museu de Lisboa – Lisboa – Portugal
– Modus Operandi — Societé — Bruxelas — Bélgica
– Punto de Partida. Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel – Sala de Arte Santander – Fundación Banco Santander — Madri — Espanha
– Le Silo — Marines — França
– Ready Made in Brasil – Galeria de Arte do Sesi/Centro Cultural FIESP – São Paulo; Sesc São José dos Campos- São José dos Campos; Sesc Rio Preto – São José do Rio Preto – Brasil
– Graphic Design Festival — Musée des Arts Décoratifs — Paris — França
– Private Choices — La centrale — Bruxelas — Bélgica
– Invitation Without Exhibition – Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Natura Plastica — Blindarte Contemporanea — Milão — Itália
– Manifesto gráfico — Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro — São Paulo — Brasil2016
– Metamorphosis — Stavos Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center – Atenas – Grécia
– Os muitos e o um: a arte contemporânea brasileira na coleção de José Olympio e Andrea Pereira – Instituto Tomie Ohtake (ITO) – São Paulo — Brasil
– Nouvelles Vagues – Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain Nîmes — Nîmes — França
– Lupa: Ensaios Audiovisuais — Museu de Artes e Ofícios — Belo Horizonte — Brasil
– Clube da Gravura: 30 anos – Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) – São Paulo – Brasil
– OMIA – One Minute in art — Paris — França
– Crosswords — Hangar — Lisboa — Portugal2015
– Imagine Brazil – DHC/Art Foundation for Contemporary Art – Montreal – Canadá
– Fins i tot un paisatge tranquil… – Can Felipa – Barcelona – Espanha
– Anozero’15. Um lance de dados – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– THUOS/HTRON: the New Coordinates of America for Nuit Blanche – University of Toronto – Toronto – Canadá
– Project 35: The Last Act – Garage Museum of Contemporary Art – Moscou – Rússia
– Phenomenon (1): Anafi Festival for Contemporary Art + Anafi – Grécia
– Le Silo – Marines – France
– Writing Diffraction – La Virreina Centre de la Image – Barcelona – Espanha
– THUOS/HTRON: the New Coordinates of America for Nuit Blanche – Nuit Blanche – Toronto – Canadá
– Engagements – Musée Saint-Croix – Poitiers – France
– Outdoors 2015 – Cité de la Céramique Sèvres – Sèvres – França
– Conversations sur l’invisible – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– El buen caligrama – The Goma – Madri – Espanha
– As the Earth Spins Beneath the Stars – Fundação Miguel Rios – Lisboa – Portugal
– Building Imaginery Bridges Across Hard Ground – Art Dubai Contemporary – Dubai – Emirados Árabes
– Les Motifs du Savoi – Mains d’œuvres – Paris – França2014
– Afetividades Eletivas – Centro Cultural Minas Tênis Clube – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Cidade Gráfica – Itaú Cultural – São Paulo – Brasil
– Há escolas que são gaiolas e há escolas que são asas – Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) – Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
– Arte e Sociedade no Brasil 2 – Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) – Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
– Imagine Brazil – MAC Lyon – Lion – França
– PER/FORM – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo [CA2M] – Madri – Espanha
– Cruzamentos: Contemporary Brazilian Art – Wexner Center for the Arts – Columbus – EUA
– Everytime you turn a page, it dies, a little – United Artists for Yvon Lambert – Paris – França
– Sssh! Del silencio un lenguaje – Galería Nuble – Santander – Espanha2013
– Escavar o Futuro – Palácio das Artes – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Amor e ódio a Lygia Clark – Zacheta National Gallery – Varsóvia – Polônia
– Imagine Brazil (Artist’s Books)- Astrup Fearnley Museet – Oslo – Noruega
– Reinventando o Mundo – Museu Vale – Vila Velha – Brasil
– Tomie Ohtake Correspondências – Instituto Tomie Ohtake – São Paulo – Brasil
– Coletiva – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Circuitos Cruzados: o Centre Pompidou encontra o MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM SP] – São Paulo – Brasil2012
– Repeat to fade – Galeria Mendes Wood – São Paulo – Brasil
– Le chat est dans la forêt – L’Atelier – Ivry-sur-Seine – França
– Traits contemporains – École des Beaux-arts de Saint-Omer – Saint-Omer – França
– Tourne-toi – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Más allá de la xilografía – Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende – Santiago- Chile
– Explorateurs – Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix – Les Sables d’Olonne – França
– This & There – Fondation d’entreprise Ricard – Paris – França
– This is Brazil! 1990-2012 – Palexco – La Corogne – Espanha
– Promenadologues #1- Centre National de l’edition et de l’art Imprimé [CNEAI] – Chatou – França
– Instante: experiência/acontecimento am Arte e Tecnologia – SESC Santo André – Santo André – Brasil
– In Other Words: The Black Market of Translations Negotiating Contemporary Cultures -Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst – Berlim – Alemanha
– A Rebours – Théâtre National de Chaillot – Paris – França
– Los impoliticos 2 – Espacio Arte Contemporanea – Montevideo – Uruguai
– The Spiral and the square – SKMU Sorlandets Kunstmuseum – Kristiansand – Noruega
– The Spiral and the Square- Trondheim Art Museum – Trondheim – Noruega2011
– Contra a Parede – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Os Primeiros Dez Anos – Instituto Tomie Ohtake – São Paulo – Brasil
– Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited – EFA Project Space – Nova York – EUA
– Instante: experiência /acontecimento – Sesc Campinas – Campinas – São Paulo – Brasil
– Ensaios de Geopoéticas – 8ª Bienal do Mercosul – Porto Alegre – Brasil
– The Spiral and the Square. Exercises on translatability – Bonnier Konsthall – Estocolmo – Suécia
– Estratégias para Luzes Acidentais- Luciana Brito Galeria – São Paulo – Brasil
– Um Outro Lugar – Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM SP] – São Paulo – Brasil
– GSM Global Sound Map – Grand Café Centre d’Art Contemporain – Saint-Nazaire – França
– Harboring Tone and Place – CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art – Annandale-on-Hudson – EUA
– Mappamundi – Museu Colecção Berardo – Lisboa – Portugal
– C’est l’amour à la plage – Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon – Sérignan – França
– La Fabrique Sonore – Domaine Pommery – Reims – França
– Mr. Memory – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França2010
– De Frente al Sol – Galerie Martin Janda – Viena – Austria
– Livre Tradução – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Arte Pará 2010- Museu do Estado do Pará- Cidade Velha- Belém- Pará
– Paralela 2010/ A contemplação do mundo- Liceu de Artes e Ofício- São Paulo- Brasil
– Ponto de equilíbrio – Instituto Tomie Ohtake- São Paulo- Brasil
– Artes e novas espacialidades- Relações Contemporâneas- Oi Futuro- Belo Horizonte- Brasil
– Living under the same roof- CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art – Annandale-on-Hudson- USA
– Epílogo – Museo de Arte de Zapopan- Zapopan- México
– Drawing time -Le temps du dessin -Galeries Poirel – Nancy- França
– Les élixirs de Panacée- Palais Bénédictine – Fécamp- França
– Le temps des manifestes-Espace de l’Art Concret- Mouans-Sartoux- França
– Ponto de Equilíbrio-Instituto Tomie Ohtake -São Paulo- Brasil
– De frente al Sol -Galerie Martin Janda- Vienna- Áustria
– Vous êtes ici… -Musée des Beaux-arts de Dunkerque- Dunkerque- França
– Arte e novas espacialidades – Oi Futuro Belo Horizonte- Belo Horizonte- Brasil
– Sustentabilidade: e eu com isso?- Bienal Brasileira de Design 2010-Curitiba- Brasil
– Narcissa- Galerie Martine Aboucaya- Paris- França
– Plateforme Roven- Café au lit -Paris- France
– Undefined borders for unlimited perceptions -Blindarte Contemporanea- Nápoles- Itália
– 2 de Copas – Vera Cortez e Tijuana/Vermelho – Lisboa – Portugal
– Paisagem Incompleta – Centro Cultural Usiminas – Minas Gerais – Brasil2009
– Undefined borders for unlimited perceptions – Blindarte Contemporanea – Nápoles – Itália
– 10ª Bienal Habana – Integración y resistencia en la era global – Havana – Cuba
– MASH UP – Artspace – Auckland – Nova Zelândia
– Volume V – I think I remember – Temple Bar Gallery – Dublin – Irlanda
-p.H Neutro – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2008
– A sombra da Historia/Os contextos que veñen – Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea – Santiago de Compostela – Espanha
– 28ª Bienal de São Paulo – Fundação Bienal de São Paulo – Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo – São Paulo – Brasil
– Trava Línguas/ tongue-twister – Vera Cortês Art Agency– Lisboa – Portugal
– Loop Diverse 2008 – International Festival & Fair for Videoart – Barcelona – Espanha
– Billboard Text Art – EMERGING WOR(L)DS – TINA B. Project – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival – Praga – República Tcheca
– Reação em Cadeia –Centro Cultural São Paulo [CCSP] – São Paulo – Brasil
– Initial – Galerie Olivari-Veys – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– Looks Conceptual ou Como Confundi um Carl André com uma Pilha de Tijolos – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2007
– Traveling Without Moving – Oboro – Montreal – Canadá
– Recortar e Colar – CRTL_C + CRTL_V – Sesc Pompéia – São Paulo – Brasil
– Close up – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Nébuleuses – LIA – Lieu d’Images et d’Art – Grenoble – França
– Re-trait – Fondation d’entreprise Ricard – Paris – França
– Cart(ajena) – Cartagena – Colombia
– Accidents : a selection of recent Brazilian videos – Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana/Bucuresti [MNAC]– Bucareste – Romênia
– Encuentro Internacional Medellín 2007 – Casa del Encuentro – Medellín – Colombia
– Encontro entre dois mares – Bienal de São Paulo-Valência – Luz ao Sul – Museo del Carmen – Valencia – Espanha
– 16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica – Videobrasil 2007- SESC Paulista – São Paulo – Brasil
– All things said, in Motion – Randall Scott Gallery – Washington DC – EUA
– Du sonore et du visuel 2 – In situ/Fabienne Leclerc – Paris – França
– Oeuvres de la collection Billarant – Dominique Perrault Architecture – Paris – França
– Weightless Days – Namura Art Meeting – Osaka – Japão2006
– Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial – Echigo –Tsumari – Japão
– 27ª Bienal de São Paulo; Como viver Junto – Pavilhão da Bienal – São Paulo – Brasil
– All that is solid melts into air – FRAC des Pays de la Loire –Carquefou – França
– Sudden Impact – Le plateau/ FRAC Ile-de-France – Paris – França
– L’usage du monde – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka – Rijeka – Croácia
– Samuel Morse meets Brian Wilson – Pode Bal – Paris – França
– Antipodes – Frac Lorraine – Metz – França
– Le corps du paysage – Galerie de l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes – Valenciennes – França
– La Cabane – Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França
– Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado: sites for sculpture in modern Brazil – Henry Moore Institute – Leeds – Inglaterra2005
– Open Nature – ICC – Tokyo – Japão
– Radiodays – De Appel – Amsterdam – Holanda
– On Difference #1 – Württembergischer Kunstverein – Stuttgart – Alemanha
– Equipée – Centre d’Art Passerelle – Brest – França
– Wharf – Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie – Saint-Clair – França
– Subversiones diarias – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires [MALBA] – Buenos Aires – Argentina
– Neither Focus – Art Cologne – Cologne – Alemanha2004
– 3rd Media_City_Seoul – Seoul Museum of Art – Seoul – Korea do Sul
– 9ª Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – Venice – Itália
– Nam June Paik Award – Dortmund – Alemanha
– 26ª Bienal de São Paulo – São Paulo – Brasil
– Em Tempo sem Tempo – Paço das Artes – São Paulo – Brasil
– Paralela – São Paulo – Brasil
– Derivas – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Bem-vindo – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Vol. – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Fachada – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2003
– GNS/Le Pavillon – Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França
– Printemps de Septembre – Toulouse – França
– Cité Internacionale des Arts – Paris – França
– Intershop Südstattsüd – Karlsruhe – Alemanha
– Incomprehension – Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França
– Imagética – Curitiba – Brasil
– Modos de Usar – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil2002
– Graphic Shows Brazil – Ginza Graphic Gallery – Toquio – Japão
– Oo – Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França2001
– São ou Não São Gravuras?– Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM SP] – São Paulo – Brasil
– Ruído do Silêncio – Instituto Itaú Cultural – Belo Horizonte – BrasilPerformances and Screenings
2018
– Fragments. National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Atenas, Grécia
– Fragments – Santos Augusta – São Paulo – Brazil
– Silêncio Fragments, Paris, France2017
– Un Autre Poème – MTRL — Quioto — Japão
– Monotonous Space – Villa Kujoyama — Quioto — Japão2014
– Voice-Over — CA2M — Madri — Espanha
– Voice-Over — Martine Aboucaya — Paris — França
– Weightless Days (Rain Season) – La Gaîté Lyrique — Paris – França
– Weightless Days (Rain Season) FRAC Provence Alpes-Côte d’Azur – Marseille — França
– Weightless Days (Rain Season) Espace de l’Art Concret – Mouans-Sartoux — França
– Weightless Days — FRAC Lorraine — Metz — França2013
– Host & Guest (Lexicon) — Tel Aviv Museum of Art — Israel2012
– Lexique — Sorbonne, Amphithéâtre Gaston Bachelard — Paris — França
– Two Voices — Martine Aboucaya — Paris — França
– Lexique — La Maison de l’Amérique Latine — Paris — França2009
– Denied Distances — Cine Humberto Mauro – Palácio das Artes — Belo Horizonte — Brazil
– Denied Distances — Cine Metrópolis — Vitória — Brasil2007
– Ano zero – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Nom de pays : le pays – pointligneplan/La fémis – Paris – França
– Weightless Days – Namura Art Meeting – Osaka — Japão
– Imagem Pensamento – Cine Humberto Mauro – Palácio das Artes – Belo Horizonte – Brasil2006
– Weightless Days/Flatland Extended – La Ferme du Buisson – Noisiel – França
– Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Two scenes in three acts – Teater 3 – Stockholm – Suécia
– Con los ojos del otro – Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo – Montevideo – Uruguay
– Videografias in(visibles) – Centro Atlantico de Arte Contemporaneo de Gran Canaria – Gran Canaria – Espanha
– Programme Tropico-Végétal/La dixième Nuit Tropicale – Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França2005
– About to Say – Galerie Martine Aboucaya – Paris – França
– Sound Waves for Selected Landscapes – 15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil – São Paulo – Brasil
– Ink is out – Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris – França
– Fête de la musique – Centre Culturel Irlandais – Paris – França
– Le placard – Glassbox – Paris – França
– Videografías in(visibles) – Fundación Museo Patio Herreriano – Valladolid – Espanha
– Terras em Trânsito – Monkeytown – Nova York – EUA
– 7º Festival de Curtas de Belo Horizonte – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Experimenta Colombia 2005 – Bogotá – Colômbia2004
– Dia em Osaka – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Terras em Transito – Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporâneo – Cidade do México – México2003
– Dobra – 14º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil – São Paulo – Brasil
– Lançamento Making Off Videobrasil – Sesc Pompéia – São Paulo – Brasil
– Festival Eletronika – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Marrom Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Panzer Túnel – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Festival de Música Experimental – São Carlos – Brasil2001
– 13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil – São Paulo – BrasilGrants & Residencies
2017
– Villa Kujoyama – Quioto – Japão2006
– XXèmes Ateliers du Frac des Pays de la Loire – Carquefou – França2005
– La Ferme du Buisson – Noisiel – França (in colaboration with the choreographers Megumi Matsumoto and Takeshi Yazaki)2004 – 2005
– Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris – França2004
– Centre National de la Danse – Pantin – Paris – França (in colaboration with the choreographer Takeshi Yazaki)2002-2003
– Le Pavillon/Palais de Tokyo – Paris – França
– Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris – FrançaAwards
2024 – Prix Marcel Duchamp (shortlisted)
2004 – Nam June Paik Award 2004Permanent installations (selection)
– La ceinture de feu – IPGP – Institut de Physique du Globe – Paris – França
– Vizinhança – Praça da Lua, Monterey – Caxias do Sul – Brasil
– x, y, z / 3 lignes sur plan – Parc Régional Naturel de la Lorraine – Creuë, Prény e Bouxières-sous-Froidmont – França
– Institut Français – Paris – França
– Les Pavillons – Collège Anatolole France – Les Pavillons-sous-Bois – France
– Roseta – Collège Alphonse Daudet – Alès – FrançaPublic Collections
– CNAP – França
– FMAC – Paris -França
– FRAC Île de France – Paris – França
– Musée du Louvre – França
– Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo – São Paulo – Brasil
– Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel – Cidade do México – México
– Musée des Sables d’Olonne — França
– Museu de Arte da Pampulha – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea – Santiago de Compostela – Espanha
– Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM SP] – São Paulo – Brasil
– Fundação Municipal de Arte Contemporânea [FMAC] – França
– FRAC Plateau – Paris – França
– Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães [MAMAM] – Recife – Brasil
– MacVal – Paris – França
– Frac Normandie – Caen – França
– Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix (Sables d’Olonne)
– FRAC Grand Large – Dunkerque – França
– Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea – Santiago de Compostela – Espanha
– Museu de Arte do Rio [MAR] – Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
– Museu Brasileiro de Escultura e Ecologia [MuBE] – São Paulo – BrasilPrivate Collections open to the public
– Cifo-Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation – EUA
– Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) – Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
– Le Silo (Collection Françoise et Jean-Philippe Billarant) – Marines – França
– Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (IFF) – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
– Fundação Leal Rios – Lisboa – Portugal
– Taguchi Art Collection – Tóquio – Japão
– Collection Lambert – Avignon – França
– Kerenidis Pepe Collection – Paris – França
– Museu de Arte de São Paulo [MASP] – São Paulo – Brasil
Em conversa com a Numéro Brasil diretamente de Paris, onde moram, Angela Detanico e Rafael Lain ficaram na dúvida se a entrevista deveria ser assinada com o nome artístico da dupla, Detanico Lain, ou se as respostas poderiam ser individualizadas. “É uma história que se confunde”, os dois concordam, com vozes que muitas vezes se sobrepõem enquanto narram sua trajetória. O casal de artistas, que se conheceu ainda no ensino médio em uma escola em Caxias do Sul (RS), vem trabalhando junto desde a década de 1990, quando criou um estúdio de design e uniu os conhecimentos de linguística e semiótica, área de Angela, à tipografia e design, campo de Rafael.
Por meio de uma residência no Palais de Tokyo, em Paris, os dois decidiram seguir nas artes visuais. Nesse período de imersão artística, que contou com uma viagem ao Vietnã, eles realizaram Flatland (2003), um vídeo produzido a partir das imagens e sons captados no delta do Mekong, um dos rios mais longos do mundo, com quase cinco mil quilômetros. Com a obra, exibida primeiro em Paris, eles ganharam o Nam June Paik Award de 2004 – uma das mais importantes premiações de arte eletrônica no mundo, criada pela instituição alemã Kunststiftung NRW – e se tornaram os artistas mais jovens a serem contemplados com o prêmio. Desde então, os dois, que ainda mantêm endereço em Caxias do Sul, têm se movido entre a França e o Brasil, criando obras em suportes como vídeo, instalações e gravuras, nas quais códigos de organização são revistos para tratar de temas como a representação no tempo e no espaço. Finalistas do Prix Marcel Duchamp 2024, criado em 2000 com o objetivo de destacar a cena francesa e apoiar artistas na consolidação de uma carreira internacional, a dupla prepara agora uma exposição no Centre Pompidou, em Paris, com abertura prevista para 1º de outubro, onde concorrerá, ao lado dos outros selecionados, a um valor em prêmio.
Vocês já disseram que se tornaram artistas somente quando foram a Paris. Por quê?
AD: Quando viemos fazer a residência em Paris [Le Pavillon, do Palais de Tokyo], paramos de fazer design gráfico. Ali, entendemos que arte era o que realmente queríamos fazer. Ter esse tempo foi o ponto mais importante da vinda a Paris, pois estávamos no começo da nossa vida artística. As residências funcionam como bolhas temporais; permitem focar apenas no trabalho artístico. Essa bolha de conforto nos permitiu pensar mais na arte.
RL: Acho que esse contato já vinha acontecendo antes, por conta do nosso diálogo com o Videobrasil e a Galeria Vermelho, mas acredito que ter feito Flatland, ter exposto no Palais de Tokyo e depois ter ganhado um prêmio na Alemanha com esse que foi o nosso primeiro trabalho, fez com que nós tomássemos consciência de que poderíamos desenvolver mais esse campo.
O trabalho de vocês se desenvolve como decorrência de viverem juntos, como se a ideia de um reverberasse a do outro. Como se dá esse processo?
AD: A transmissão de uma ideia pela palavra, quando está nascendo, é algo complicado. Apesar de nos conhecermos muito, e às vezes quase anteciparmos o pensamento um do outro, cada um entende o que quer, e é desse entendimento que pode surgir outra resposta. Mas, é claro, as ideias aparecem como uma espécie de flash, e depois há outro lado de pesquisa. Para nós, é muito importante essa ligação dos trabalhos com o mundo da ciência, da história da arte ou mesmo com a história das ideias, que são conceitos que trabalhamos sempre e que representam um processo de pesquisa rigoroso.
RL: Acho também que o acaso, que não é tão visível no nosso trabalho, é quase o elemento principal. Porque, mesmo quando pensamos na ordem alfabética, o fato de o A ser a primeira letra e o Z ser a última é uma construção cultural que não é determinada por nada. Enquanto os artistas da arte concreta ou da arte conceitual trabalham muito com a matemática, que é um sistema lógico, a linguagem, que é o nosso campo de interesse, é um grande acaso.
Muitas das suas obras estão relacionadas com a passagem do tempo e a noção de transitoriedade. De que forma vocês acreditam que essa noção se aplica à trajetória de vocês?
AD: Continuamos trabalhando muito com essa ideia da percepção do tempo, e acho que o tempo é um aliado do artista, porque, quando vamos construindo uma obra, reforçamos o que temos a dizer. Acredito que fazemos obras, ao invés de peças. O que fica é um discurso mais longo.
RL: A impressão que tenho do nosso trabalho é que continuamos retrabalhando, que as obras não estão terminadas, e seguimos voltando sempre para as mesmas ideias.
O que esperar da exposição no Pompidou?
AD: A montagem começa em setembro, mas, como é uma competição, não podemos falar muito. Podemos adiantar que haverá obras novas, que conversam com o que temos feito.
RL: A nossa ideia é tentar sintetizar um pouco do nosso pensamento, e vamos trabalhar com a irreversibilidade do tempo; com o fato de que o tempo é uma variável e pode ir para frente ou para trás, apesar da nossa experiência de realidade mostrar apenas uma direção.
Se tivessem que entrevistar um ao outro, qual seria a primeira pergunta que fariam?
AD: Já tivemos uma experiência parecida com essa quando produzimos em conjunto o diálogo De Alfa a Ômega [para o catálogo da exposição “Alfabeto Infinito”, na Fundação Iberê Camargo, em 2013], mas, se tivesse que resumir em uma questão, eu perguntaria o que o Rafael irá preparar para o jantar – é ele que cozinha.
RL: E eu perguntaria o que a Angela gostaria de jantar hoje.
Mapping, Coding, Translating: Concrete Legacies in the Work of Detanico Lain
Pedro Erber, Waseda University
Abstract: The text explores the work of the Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain in their multifarious relationship with the legacies of translation theory, poetic concretism, and the visual poetry of Kitasono Katue. In conversation with Detanico Lain and the Paris-based art critic and theorist Federico Nicolao, we wonder through their recent body of work and through the constellation of artists, literary authors, and scientists whose poetic paths approached and intersected with their own.
Keywords: Translation, poetry, art, Federico Nicolao, Kitasono Katue
“A sign are we, senseless (Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos),” wrote Friedrich Hölderlin in 1803, in the poem “Mnemosyne.”1 The Swabian poet’s persistent experience of the limits of language and signification heralds, in more than one way, the ethos of modern poetics. The unrelenting struggle for sense as an operation that must always recommence, repeatedly revealing the fundamental senselessness of human existence, returns in a peremptory fashion in this muchdiscussed passage of Hölderlin’s “In Lovely Blue” (1808): “Is there a measure on earth? There is none (Gibt es auf Erden ein Maß? Es gibt keines).” Much could be said about the resonance of these verses throughout the history of modern poetry, in its multiple attempts at a thorough renewal of language. The same radical motivation illuminates the trajectories of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings, all the way through to the “verbivocovisual” poetics of the Noigandres group and the myriad ramifications of their work.2 This same impetus informs and shapes the artistic trajectory of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, in their continuous search for the origin of signification, their incessant creation of coding systems that map, decipher, and re-cipher our encounters with nature, and their theoretical and material exploration of the manifold relationships between the earth and its all-too-human measures, norms, and patterns. Drawing from their respective backgrounds in design and semiotics, Detanico and Lain work across multiple media and techniques combining digital and video art with sculpture, drawing, and even traditional techniques such as Japanese gold leaf painting. The poetic experience materialized in their work constitutes itself as an effort of translation—translation from the language of nature into the language of humans, translation of existing human languages into an expanding variety of invented codes—as if each of their works strove to confer material shape on the translating impetus that animates the modern poetic experience, thus adding to it yet another layer of translation; namely, the translation from the realm of poetry to that of contemporary art. The pages that follow endeavor to render this fundamentally visual experience back into the verbal and conceptual realm. 3 They originate in a conversation, a public dialogue on the occasion of Detanico Lain’s 2017 exhibition at the Brazilian Embassy in Tokyo.4 But it might be more accurate to situate their actual starting point in another conversation, which took place half a century earlier, between Haroldo de Campos, the Japanese poet Kitasono Katue, and the poet and musician L. C. Vinholes.5 Kitasono’s visual poetics was a constant source of inspiration during Detanico and Lain’s residence at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto and resonated throughout the 2017 exhibition in Tokyo. Then and now, the question of poetic translation and the relationship between the visual and verbal realms are at the center of the conversation. True translation, in contrast to its common representation6 , does not take place between two previously existing, ready-made linguistic realms. On the contrary, each time, translation must establish the boundaries of a new linguistic territory, demarcating the limits between languages, so that a relationship of correspondence can first be created. As such, translation’s relationship to language is, at its very core, like a mapping practice that traces form, limits, and order onto nature. Only on the basis of this essential mapping function of translation, this drawing of boundaries between linguistic territories, can one speak of its fidelity; only on this basis can a translation be said to be exact, literal, or free in relation to an “original,” which is in turn repeatedly remapped, recreated or, as Haroldo de Campos would put it, “transcreated.”7 Detanico Lain bring this mapping endeavor to center stage. In their 2019 exhibition at Tokyo’s The Club, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (Figure 1; Plates 1, 2, and 3), the viewer lands on an imaginary island, crossed by the International Date Line, divided between the bright of day and a starry night, between East and West—a space that holds the secret to our human measurement of earthly time, and thus to the arbitrary origin of the mapping of time onto space. The environment brings to mind the “postutopianism” of Liam Gillick’s Discussion Island, while simultaneously echoing Italo Calvino’s quasialgorithmic compositions in Invisible Cities. An artificial island, architecturally planned and constructed: as such, a site for contemplation. Can we ever learn to inhabit it?
Imposing itself at the center of the island, the Date Line appears as a paradigmatic site of translation, an imaginary border that constitutes the very condition of its possibility. And as a site of the encounter and fusion of separate temporalities in a single poetic instant, the secret it holds is also that of radical contemporaneity. Taking cues from semiotics and the natural sciences, Detanico Lain’s approach to mapping and coding is nonetheless never simply scientific. Their rigor is of an entirely different order than that of Jorge Luis Borges’s cartographers, who managed to draw the map of an entire empire on a 1-to-1 scale, so that each sign coincided exactly with the actual geographic place it represented, as if in an utopic communion between the real and the imaginary. What we find in Detanico Lain is, instead, a problematization of the arbitrary nature of our very representations of the universe, works that promote a conscious liberation of the creative signifying impulse from the conventional borders of time and space. Between the rocky waves of a Zen garden, what their works present to us is not a peaceful image of nature but the always-evasive object of both our science and our poetry: sense (Figure 2; Plate 4).
Figure 2. Sense (2019)
This search for sense spills over from the material and the poetic to the conceptual and critical. Here, material and concept, art and criticism, science and art, are not opposed, but find themselves instead in a constant, open dialogue spanning the whole globe, regardless of conventional east-west, north-south cartographic divisions. The Earth itself appears (and at times conceals itself) from myriad perspectives that reflect its relative position in cosmic space. Our initial conversation was joined by the Paris-based writer, critic, and translator Federico Nicolao, one of the most original voices in European art criticism today and a long-time admirer of Brazilian poetry and art. In a kind of e-mail-based-renga-in-prose, Detanico Lain’s works lead our conversation from the concrete movement and visual poetry to mathematics and the Oulipo, Paul Valéry, James Joyce, Copernicus and Galileo, all the way to the Moon and back. This transcontinental, originally multilingual exchange is what follows below, in English translation.
Dialogue: Pedro Erber, Federico Nicolao, Angela Detanico, Rafael Lain Pedro Erber: I want to return to the conversation that we started at the occasion of your 2017 exhibition at the Brazilian Embassy in Tokyo. If I were to describe in few words what impressed me the most in your work at that point, I would say it was the subtlety and simplicity in the way those pieces materialize concepts, translating them into a visual language that expresses something comparable to mathematical beauty. I recall an old quarrel between the Brazilian poets Ferreira Gullar and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos about the idea of mathematical poetry.8 Until the end of his life Gullar came back to it from time to time in his column in the daily “Folha de São Paulo.” He claimed that his initial break with the group of concrete poets of São Paulo came from his disagreement with their project of applying mathematical rules to poetry. And Gullar added that, in fact, the paulistas ended up never composing such mathematical poems, which led him to decide that he would no longer agree to publish a manifesto spelling out rules for a poetry still to be written. Each time I thought of this controversy I wondered what those mathematical poems could have looked like, and what Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos were seeking in this rapprochement between poetry and mathematics that, if Gullar is to be believed, they never carried out. In your recent works, in which an intimate dialogue with concrete poetry seems to set the tone, I feel as if, for the first time, I could get a glimpse of what this mathematical poetry may look like. I am thinking of Vague (2010), for instance, and of White Square (2017; Figure 3; Plate 5) in particular. The mathematical element emerges here not so much as calculation or the mere application of rules—although those aspects are also present in many of those works—but mainly as a creative method. Each of those works proposes new rules, new principles, and, in a way, a new experimental poetic language, which drives forward the project of a verbivocovisual poetry, while simultaneously recalling a crucial aspect of mathematics itself, which is expressed in the ancient Greek word μάθημα, meaning “subject of instruction,” or perhaps more to the point: that which can be learned.
Figure 3. White Square (2017)
This apprenticeship, this action of learning is, in my view, where the driving force for each of these works can be found: learning a code, a new formula and a new form of poetic writing: writing that, beyond verbivocovisual expression, also exists as a tridimensional object, pursuing the path opened by the neo-concrete proposals of Gullar, Lygia Pape, and others. Detanico Lain: Art is the invention of new languages to express reality and to elaborate new concepts to deal with reality, to contain it. It is a creative movement that paves the way to sublimate the understanding of the world and, ultimately, to enable its construction. Every one of our works creates its own language to a certain extent—as if, in order to express each new sentence, one would need an entirely new language. Each work is an expression of this process, and simultaneously its culmination.
Meanwhile, taking the opposite path—thus going from work to language— presupposes, as you said, a commitment, an experience beyond contemplation. This is the path that interests us, from work towards code, from hypothesis towards problem, from answer to question. It is a return to the time of invention and discovery that spans learning and understanding. We tap into a poetic force in this movement and, in it, we glimpse the fusion of form and concept to which we aspire in our works. This reminds us that, in order to speak of things, names and definitions were created, that the phenomena of nature have been synthetized in physical formulas, that forms, rhythms and harmonies have tended toward complete abstraction in mathematics. This movement makes us remember that the sun and the moon are celestial bodies we contemplate in the sky but also symbolic, mathematical and mythical objects intertwined with the many facets of the system of knowledge constructed to accommodate the pace of a finite existence at the perpetual rhythm of days and nights, to reconcile experience on the human scale with the consciousness of the infinite. Turning the concrete reality of the world into language is a process of invention, in which desires, poetry and ideologies are articulated. Looking at it in this way, we can have a glimpse of the rationality, curiosity and fantasy of human nature. Today, languages and codes overlap, organizing and complexifying reality through different levels of abstraction. Language is spoken, then written, then codified, transmitted, and translated. We can explore this complexity by using different “materials” such as sounds, words and intervals, or by being inspired by other research fields such as mathematics, thanks to the legacy of all those who dared to mix, combine, and transgress different genres and disciplines. Like the latin palindrome SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS that inspired Anton Webern for the 12-tone series. This is indeed a very curious and exciting moment in the history of art.
Federico Nicolao: Here we should also not forget our dearest European visual poet, Jean-Luc Godard, who, having dreamt in his youth of pursuing the route of mathematics, later chose as the title for a much misunderstood exhibition “Voyage(s) in Utopia, 1946-2006, Searching for a Lost Theorem.” Following in the footsteps of Évariste Galois and Niels Abel, two mathematicians, his dream was clearly to reach, through the art of cinema, the theorem that would have enabled him to rethink the word/image relationship. But this is another story.
D/L: Eisenstein, too, spoke of the word/image relation in his essay “The cinematographic principle and the ideogram,” when discussing the art of editing as a form of writing akin to the ideogram, in which a sign, he argued, is composed of different “scenes.” In the same essay, he also spoke of Japanese poetry as a form of composed images, just like in cinema.
Nicolao: In this same direction, which grazes the impalpable but is nonetheless very concrete, you worked with Takeshi Yasaki, the choreographer, in Kyoto to render a poem by Kitasono Katue in gestures and images—Monotonous Space (performed at Villa Kujoyama, 2017)—where performance functioned as a cinema of ideas that enabled ideograms to become once again a kind of plastic form.
D/L: Our goal was to approach plastic forms as transforming bodies that evolve in space and time. Weightless Days, a performance we did in 2006 with Takeshi Yasaki and Megumi Matsumoto, was our first experience in this direction. We designed a space in transformation for dancers, a kind of playing field, with animations projected in black and white on the stage, constructing the space with zones of shade and light. These abstract forms in movement, inhabited by two dancers, bring up dualities like night and day, presence and absence, masculine and feminine.
D/L: In Monotonous Space, Kitasono’s text adds a new vector; the poem provides the subject of the piece and the rhythm of the images. It also led us to deal with language as both writing and speaking: that is, as a graphic element in the animations and as voice in the sound composition. These performances are moments of convergence, where visual forms, sound, poetry, and gesture are mixed; they contaminate each other, overflow into each other. An intersection of disciplines where delimitations no longer make sense, a machine in which multiple pieces come together as a complex whole, where the image can provide rhythm, gesture can be graphic, sound is embodied and the word duplicates itself in sound and image.
After Monotonous Space, we created a suite with two other poems by Kitasono, presented at Kyoto’s Nuit Blanche by Megumi Matsumoto. And we are working on a third part with the duo Takeshi and Megumi (Plate 6).
Erber: Your interest in the Japanese poet Kitasono Katue (1902-1978) can be said to recuperate a central thematic of concrete poetry and resume a longstanding dialogue between Brazilian and Japanese avant-garde poetry. Towards the end of the 1950s, Haroldo de Campos got in contact with Kitasono through Ezra Pound. Pound knew of the Brazilian poet’s interest in ideographic writing and sensed a mutual affinity. Campos and Kitasono started a sporadic correspondence, exchanging poems and translations. Albeit courteous and fed by mutual interest in each other’s work, their relationship cannot be said to have deeply impacted the trajectory of either of them. In part, perhaps, because Kitasono’s poetry was not particularly ideographic; but also because he was never completely convinced by the principles of concretism, even though he went as far as translating the Noigandres’ Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, which he published in 1964 in his avant-garde poetry journal VOU. Many of the pieces in Archipel (2018; Plates 7 and 8) were conceived during your residence at the Villa Kujoyama, in Kyoto, where you delved more deeply into your research on Kitasono and into a dialogue with Japanese art and aesthetics—both traditional and contemporary. One crucial aspect in your work on this dialogue, which differentiates it from the earlier concretist moment, is that your interest in Kitasono does not stem from a general curiosity and fascination about ideographic writing, but rather from a specific interest in his experimental project of constructing a plastic-poetic language. I think the Archipel (Setting Stones) (Plate 7) installation nicely embodies this bifurcated dialogue: on the one hand, with the zen tradition, through its reference to the stone garden of the Daitokuji temple, and, on the other hand, with Kitasono’s avant-garde project—not to mention its striking visual resonances with the work of Suga Kishio.
D/L: Kitasono understood how important it was to take the text as image, as forms on paper. Writing is not only a vector of concepts or mental images; it is also, literally, an image. That explains the interest of Brazilian concrete poets in his work. And naturally ours. Our very first project, Font Delta (2002), was an attempt to show the natural evolution of languages through the visual transformation of letters. Kitasono was a master of rhythm and patterns. In certain poems he created impressive visual, sound and conceptual patterns, arranging repetitions and voids. We see the strong visual rhythm he creates with the arrangment of the letters as musical scores. These are the aspects of his poetry, and particularly his poem Tanchō-na Kūkan (1949-1978), which inspired us to make White Square (2017), an installation created upon our return from our artists’ residence in Kyoto. The first lines of the poem—that are repeated at the end—are transcoded in Pilha-Kana (2006; Figure 4), a writing/sculpture that links hiragana characters to ordered groups of objects, a version for Japanese of our piled-up writing system. In the installation, the piled-up words are formed by rejoinders of blocks of white plaster on which Malevich painted his black square, and they themselves delimit, by their positioning, the angles of a square: a play of oppositions, presence/absence.
With great visual talent, Kitasono transcended verbal language in his Plastic Poems (1960s-1970s). His avant-garde poetry shifts away from traditional poetic forms, which is why his work has remained relatively unknown, even in Japan. We are deeply involved with his economic use of words, the use of repetitions, a certain theatricality, as ritual, not in the evocative or mystical sense but as the systematization of a gesture, of certain ways of doing. We think of the periodic reconstruction of the temples of Ise: from the same plans, with the same tools and the same gestures, in 20-year cycles repeated for centuries. We think of dry garden patterns, the complexity of their mineral arrangements, which aim at perfection through repetition; and of the relationship to nature that informs the conception of these gardens, imagined like miniature landscapes that refer to wide open spaces.
The work Archipel (Setting Stones) integrates this ritual aspect because it implies a gesture, a codified gesture. It draws inspiration from the Sakuteiki, an eleventh-century Japanese garden book. It defines the creation of a garden as the art of placing stones (Ishi wo taten koto). In Setting Stones, the stones/letters are distributed in space by the pace of human steps in a sequence of twenty-six positions based on the letters of the alphabet. Each word made of stones is a word-landscape, or more accurately, a word-garden, a micro-landscape composed of few elements in which the void or the silence—the alphabetical organization of the letters is implicit in the spatial distribution of the stones— signifies as much as the presence of the objects. It is a kind of contemplative writing.
Erber: But beyond concrete poetry, literature is omnipresent in your work and of course in this exhibition. For example, Ulysses by James Joyce who, of course was another inventor of language.
D/L: We scanned the 732 pages of Joyce’s novel and literally animated them. A man walks, endlessly, borrowing his steps and contours from Étienne-Jules Marey’s deconstruction of movement (Plate 8). Nicolao: There is also that large work, very slight and almost invisible. I am referring to Horizon.
D/L: Upon our return from Japan, we left for the Sables d’Olonne to think about the exhibition’s content. We wanted to attain a sense of immersion in that landscape, in that expanse of tide-measured sea, that fluid landscape that plays hide and seek with the sky. It was under this contemplative state that the idea of Horizon (Figure 5) came to us. We searched for the word horizon in several books and retained from them only each line containing this word. We aligned these pages to form a word horizon line on the wall. We began with Georges Perec’s novel A Void, assuming we would find it there, since the word horizon does not contain the letter “e”! Then followed horizons found in novels, poems, but also in philosophy and aesthetics, so as to let our horizon emerge at the edge of concepts and consciousness. It’s an exquisite corpse joining Roubaud, Mallarmé, Foucault, Blanchot, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and a few others. The final piece is a collection of 360 pages coming from twentysix books, a long line of horizon coming from our personal library.
Figure 5. Horizon (2018)
Nicolao: This reminds me of an observation by another expert mathematician, Paul Valéry, who wrote in his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci: “He who has never completed—be it but in dream—the sketch for some project that he is free to abandon; who has never felt the sense of adventure in working on some composition which he knows finished when others only see it commencing; who has not known the enthusiasm that burns away a minute of his very self; or the poison of conception, the scruple, the cold breath of objection coming from within; and the struggle with alternative ideas when the strongest and most universal should naturally triumph over both what is normal and what is novel; he who has not seen the image on the whiteness of his paper distorted by other possible images, by his regret for all the images that will not be chosen; or seen in limpid air a building that is not there; he who is not haunted by fear of the giddiness caused by the receding of the goal before him; by anxiety as to means; by foreknowledge of delays and despairs, calculation of progressive phases, reasoning about the future—even about things that should not, when the time comes, be reasoned about—that man does not know either—and it does not matter how much he knows besides—the riches and resources, the domains of the spirit, that are illuminated by the conscious act of construction. The gods have received from the human mind the gift of the power to create because that mind, being cyclical and abstract, may aggrandize what it has imagined to such a point that it is no longer capable of imagining it” (101). The calculation of progressive phases: this necessarily approximative science, which questions the future, comes close to the future, but lets it go. Maybe this is the place to search for one of the few non-exotic bridges between different traditions in poetry. Perhaps this is also what Pound sought in his own hermetic manner: the capacity of poetry to think in images.
D/L: We took great pleasure in exploring one of Valéry’s manuscripts in the Conscience (2016) animation. But as you say, that is another story. Valéry was well aware of this human being formed by the cogito, by abstraction, by the flow of ideas more or less anchored in the possible and the experience of reality: an idealization with its contradictions, its ups and downs. Our walking man, Ulysses, is this being, this more-or-less fluid syntax at the intersection of experience, research, memory and folly. It is a being-language. A body made of text, a referenced interior monologue, a sort of echo of the novel where Joyce has one body organ corresponding to each chapter.
Erber: Cosmic space is another recurrent element in the works gathered for the 2017 exhibition at the Brazilian Embassy, as well as in the monographic project in Sables d’Olonne, and again more recently in the 2019 exhibition at The Club. I am thinking here of your observation of space from Earth—the horizon, the phases of the moon, the International Date Line—and your interpretation of nature through language, as in the establishment of geographic maps—of both the Earth and the sky. The references to Copernicus, with 365 Suns (Plate 9), to Galileo with 28 Moons (Plate 10), and to the astronomer and mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch with Timezonetype, speak to your affinities between scientific activity and poetic, artistic practice.
D/L: I would rather say that it is the relation between cosmic time and human time, between the world and the experience of the world that is mediated by science. Like subjectivity meeting its extreme in the idea of infinity. In works such as Star Names, 365 Suns, 28 Moons, etc. science is brought back to daily experience, posed as the erudite explanation of daily phenomena. The sun is a star, an apparent movement, the succession of days and the cycle that defines the year. But the sun is also an image that wakes us up each day, that calls us. In explaining the world, science also explains the human condition. We see extreme beauty—and why not a beautiful illusion—in all these science-created systems, explanations, and codes. An enormous energy… It makes me think of the quote by Valéry you mentioned…
Nicolao: Somewhat, perhaps, like Willys de Castro’s poems from 1953, the dimensions of cosmic space and that of earthly time speak to each other. Let me end by just quoting two of his poems:
geometria viva
fixa no extremo do traço
eclode vagarosa do centro
a vaga explode rosa
onde amo a côr
e a forma que expressa
o perfume no tempo
and this one:
tento
ide
ponto
no céu
a adaga
Works Cited
and this one: tento ide ponto no céu a adaga Works Cited Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, 1974. Campos, Haroldo de. Novas: Selected Writings. Edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros. Northwestern UP, 2007. Erber, Pedro. Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan. U of California P, 2015. Gullar, José Ribamar Ferreira. Experiência neoconcreta: momento limite da arte. Cosac Naify, 2007. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Werke Briefe Dokumente. Winkler Verlag, 1990. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity. On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. U of Minnesota P, 1993. Valéry, Paul. “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” Selected Writings. Translated by Denis Devlin, New Directions, 1964, pp. 89-107.
Quantas questões uma obra pode suscitar? Quando Leonardo da Vinci escreveu em um de seus cadernos que ‘arte é coisa mental’, talvez anunciasse precocemente o que estaria por vir nos séculos seguintes. Os trabalhos de A. Detanico e R. Lain reafirmam a independência da arte no campo filosófico – a arte é por si mesma um pensamento. Pensamento que se coloca no tênue limite entre o visível e o invisível e estabelece possibilidades de trânsito entre arte e ciência, entre textos, contextos e linguagens – tipografia, design gráfico, vídeo e arquitetura. Estruturas são desmontadas e remontadas, inquietações gramaticais tecem a forma e a palavra. Que olhos vêem (lêem) que mundo?
Em Zulu Time temos a correspondência entre letras do alfabeto e o sistema de fuso horário em que se divide o globo terrestre, redesenhando o mundo. Em Um dado lugar as placas de sinalização apontam para lugares localizados em diferentes fusos horários. Estados de (des)orientação neste constante estado de passagem em que vivemos. As geografias do mundo: fatiado, recortado e reconstruído.
Estamos no mundo da aceleração. O espaço-tempo está comprimido entre comunicação global e a quebra de barreiras geográficas. Mudar o ponto de vista nessa geografia tensa em que vivemos ao processar novos olhares sobre o mundo. Um dado tempo nos faz olhar do ponto de vista do pólo sul: relógios indicando a hora em diferentes fusos horários, cada um corresponde às letras que formam a frase ‘um dado tempo’.
O tempo, essa ‘sucessão de instantes acumulados’ após o outro, está inserido na obra Maré. Construído com camadas de vinil azul sobrepostas, invade as paredes transparentes do museu, possibilitando-nos procurar em um texto o outro e dissolver um texto em outro. Sobrepostas a`´agua da Lagoa da Pampulha, as marés tipográficas oscilam, sobem e descem, originando o texto que escorre.
Que olhos lêem (vêem ) que texto? Lemos ou apenas tateamos o mundo? A obra Braile Ligado configura-se como uma tipografia grafada com a luz a partir da escritura em braile.
O vídeo Flatland nos proporciona uma viagem de barco no delta do rio Mekong, Vietnã. A paisagem se revela lentamente na margem do rio planificada, estendida e fatiada em colunas de pixels. Somos tomados por música, vozes e sons de um rádio fora de sintonia.
Mover o mapa. No mundo não há mais lugar. As ideologias dissolvem-se nos frágeis limites do pensamento. Por meio de um gesto simples, utilizando um programa de edição de texto, o mundo alinha-se à esquerda, à direita ou ao centro? Fina ironia apresentada no vídeo O Mundo Justificado…
Montar, desmontar, realinhar, olhar sob outro ponto de vista, desconfigurar, escrever, ler… Afinal, que olhos vêem que mundo? Que olhos lêem que texto?
– Marconi Drummond (curador) – Fabíola Moulin (coordenadora de Artes Visuais)
A língua é um material tão constrangido pelas suas regras, códigos e convenções que é redobrar a dificuldade a imposição de novos constrangimentos numa prática artística na qual a linguagem é o instrumento principal. Se depois da fundação de Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) em 1960 por Raymond Queneau e François Le Lionnais, as práticas literárias por constrangimento de todo o gênero desenvolveram-se abundantemente, as artes plásticas tendo feito recurso a textos, palavras e letras das vanguardas aos nossos dias, inscreveram menos as suas pesquisas na valorização do significado do que na do significante da linguagem, ela mesma entendida como material. A poesia visual e concreta – no Brasil podemo-nos referir, por exemplo, à obra de Haroldo e Augusto de
Campos – já tinha igualmente explorado a plástica da linguagem através de inumeráveis espacializações, de cores, de suportes ou de matérias as quais menorizavam temporariamente as funções da mensagem para colocar o acento sobre a “função poética”. A linguagem era apreciada por ela mesma, pelas suas sonoridades e agenciamentos, pelas suas formas e grafias possíveis, tomando a visualidade vantagem sobre o sentido imediato. É, entre outras, nesta longa e rica história de uma certa produção poética que vêm ter lugar certos trabalhos de Angela Detanico e de Rafael Lain.
O lúdico é um outro elemento essencial do seu trabalho, ao ponto em que este induz o espectador em trilhos falsos se este não dispõe de um mapa para caminhar; dito de outro modo, do código que dá acesso à significação dos signos plástico-verbais. Porque é disso que se trata no procedimento que rege a composição nos néons e em Nomes das estrelas. A este respeito, mesmo quando ele é alongado até ao alógico ou ao nonsense, o material da linguagem é um sistema de constrições tão potente que, ou nós respeitamos um mínimo de regras ainda com o objetivo de manipular a linguagem, ou nos afastamos radicalmente para nos encontrarmos na plástica pura. Detanico e Lain operam aqui de tal modo que o aspecto estritamente visual das obras contém nele mesmo a linguagem modelizada ou semi-modelizada plasticamente. A teoria dos modelos em matemática, em física e em lingüística consiste em esquematizar, em reduzir a alguns termos e regras, um campo geralmente bem diferente daquele no qual ele será formalizado ou modelizado. Nos trabalhos de Detanico e Lain, é este gênero de transformação que é empregado, o qual é menos uma tradução do que uma transposição do visual em verbal ou do verbal em visual. Para que o modelo ou a formalização sejam operantes, devemos poder passar de uma estrutura a outra. Mesmo se as formas não são simples de identificar, o potencial de atualização da linguagem e do visual está ao alcance de todos mediante o conhecimento da regra ou do código.
Assim acontece com os néons aparentemente dispostos segundo um agenciamento estritamente plástico, espécie de paródia às obras de Flavin. Trata-se na realidade de uma reconfiguração do alfabeto Braille destinado aos cegos, o qual foi inventado por Louis Braille em 1829 (ele mesmo privado da sua visão na seqüência de um acidente), e que permite a leitura táctil das letras graças a pontos ligeiramente em relevo. Um caractere braille é representado pela combinação de 1 a 6 pontos dispostos sobre uma matriz de dois pontos de largura por três pontos de altura. Estes pontos são aliás aqui determinados pelas articulações entre os néons, assinalados unicamente pela sua ausência visual e táctil. Detanico e Lain ligaram os pontos entre eles graças aos tubos de néon tal como em certos jogos de palavras cruzadas nós devemos juntar as letras espalhadas a fim de reencontrar a palavra escondida -, de modo a que uma pessoa tendo consciência do braille pode reconstituir a palavra. E mesmo reconstituí-la de modo táctil. A palavra é certamente visível e palpável, mas somente legível uma vez entregue a terceira codificação realizada a partir da formalização do nosso alfabeto corrente em braille. Ligando os pontos ausentes, Detanico e Lain tornaram visíveis os percursos dos dedos traçando, precisamente, uma linha invisível, mas corporalmente consumada. Para quem não vê, esta linha tênue é realmente traçada sob a ponta dos dedos. O sistema elaborado pelos artistas, simplesmente chamado Braille ligado, é então semi-modelizado, isto porque um segundo sistema de signos de linguagem é anterior à formação plástica dos elementos dos quais as significações e as funções são desviadas. Porém, trata-se claramente de um sistema significante, na medida em que todas as combinações existentes em braille integram uma outra plasticidade que nos reenvia à língua natural.
No sistema inteiramente modelizado de Nome das estrelas, a plástica dos objetos e das imagens não é mais a da linguagem ou das palavras trabalhadas nelas mesmas as quais seriam tiradas de um sistema semiótico equivalente a uma estrutura lingüística. Enquanto que os néons são a variante de um alfabeto verdadeiro e universal, as estrelas são o resultado de uma codificação criada inteiramente por Detanico e Lain, em colaboração com Jiri Skala. As 26 letras do nosso alfabeto começaram por ser reduzidas convencionalmente a um ponto negro mais ou menos grosso segundo o conteúdo da tipografia dos caracteres Helvetica, como se estes estivessem comprimidos. A cada ponto, necessariamente diferente, corresponde uma letra e uma só. Graças a um computador, podemos escrever em pontos e basta-nos um clic para ver rapidamente aparecer nos caracteres Helvetica do nosso alfabeto a palavra ou a frase antes datilografada sobre a forma de pontos ou inversamente. Podemos aumentar ou reduzir estes pontos, o seu valor manter-se-á idêntico, tal diâmetro codificando sempre a letra correspondente. Tal como os mapas do céu nos apresentam as estrelas sob a forma de pontos através da abóbada celeste e a sua magnitude (número que caracteriza o brilho de um astro) é representada para pontos mais ou menos importantes, Detanico e Lain tiveram a idéia singular, não de as unir como nos mapas numa espécie de linguagem braille para as pessoas que vêem mas que não são astrônomos mas de meter em relação as grossuras dos pontos modelizados da Helvetica com o nome das estrelas. Cada letra compondo o nome da estrela (por exemplo, Aldebaran, Bellatrix ou Nair al Saif) é deste modo figurada por círculos, os quais permitem visualizar literalmente a forma plástica do nome. Uma vez transferidas para o suporte, nós obtemos ao mesmo tempo a magnitude da estrela escolhida e a magnitude do seu nome, sabendo, no entanto, que o brilho da imagem não corresponde à magnitude real das estrelas, mas é proporcional à quantidade de letras de seu nome. Tudo isto não tendo, evidentemente, sentido ou não tendo qualquer função a não ser no interior do sistema imaginado pelos artistas. Aqui é essencial a criação do sistema, com as relações de estrutura entre signos e os símbolos sem os quais a configuração é incompreensível. É assim que numerosos códigos recorrendo a inscrições ou a modalidades mais que estranhas (código da estrada, sinais marítimos, código de barras, telégrafos) puderam ser criados e tornarem-se funcionais. Detanico e Lain inventaram então um sistema de símbolos arbitrários no qual as regras significantes são inteiramente respeitadas. Aquilo que os lingüistas chamam de “códigos de segunda articulação” ou aquilo que o filósofo Nelson Goodman nomeia, mais geralmente, um “sistema notacional” com as suas relações sintáxicas e semânticas, sendo a música o exemplo típico deste gênero de notações.
Fazendo parte de um gênero diferente de trabalhos, White Noise consiste em selecionar na fotografia tirada por satélite de uma parte da Amazônia, as 256 cores disponíveis de um tela de computador, de fato, uma imagem digital comprimida para transmissão via internet. À medida que as cores presentes na imagem são selecionadas e invadem o tela da sua brancura (o branco não sendo mais do que a mistura de cores aditivas) aumenta proporcionalmente o som disponível no computador. O ruído branco do sonoro é assim equivalente ao ruído branco do visual, como se os pontos selecionados se transformassem simultaneamente no mesmo número de sonoridades. Se não parece ser intenção dos artistas apresentar uma qualquer metáfora da desflorestamento da Amazônia e da poluição do seu imenso rio, não nos podemos no entanto impedir de pensar nisso, na medida em que, o que chamamos de “ruído branco” é o som contínuo e indistinto produzido pelo impacto de milhares de gotas d’água. A brancura que invade surge como uma espécie de desertificação progressiva da imagem à medida que avoluma o som de um referente aquático tornado totalmente invisível.
As interações do sonoro, do visual e do verbal que Detanico e Lain metem em cena jogam assim sobre diferentes estratos significantes que têm todos em comum serem arbitrários ou convencionais mas não aleatórios. O aparente desregulamento ou desestruturação é já prevista pelo sistema que aqui preside. No entanto, a impressão final de certas obras, em particular daquelas que apelam à manipulação dos pixels das telas, é a de que elas dão a ver ou a entender, de um modo completamente diferente, uma espécie de representação estocástica (do grego stokhastikos, “conjectural”) do conjunto. Como na musica estocástica, aqui os elementos crescem e decrescem, aparecem e apagam-se, tomam forma e desvanecem-se num dos mais estranhos indeterminismos. Tudo parece tão bem regido, agenciado e previsto que a entropia em direção à qual tende tudo isso mergulha-nos na perplexidade. Isto porque as representações dos alfabetos, as letras, as palavras ou as sonoridades diversas reenviam todas ao nosso uso quotidiano. Em última instância, as modelizações de Detanico e Lain são uma representação estocástica da realidade. Nós falamos, agimos, entendemos e produzimos gestos e sons que, freqüentemente, se distorcem, perdem a sua forma e significação inicial. E se as nossas palavras e ações podem retornar mais ou menos a um certo estado original, sabemos que entretanto uma duração escoou-se, o tempo não é mais o mesmo, a realidade dos corpos, percepções, gestos e frases transformou-se literalmente. Para dizê-lo de uma maneira séria, e segundo a fórmula de Hegel, nós compreendemos que “uma forma de vida envelheceu”.
O jogo artístico de Detanico e Lain é então este serio ludere sem o qual nenhum jogo se pode desenrolar e fazer agir os jogadores. E o jogo que nos é aqui proposto consiste em jogar contra o nosso próprio tempo. Certamente que as escalas de grandeza temporal são incomensuráveis: um grande número de estrelas ainda perceptíveis a olho nu dissiparam-se no nada depois de muito tempo, se bem que são para nós ainda visíveis, dada a sua distância a milhões de anos-luz; perceber as interações do sonoro e do visual em White Noise não nos leva mais do que alguns minutos. Dizendo melhor: as escalas de grandeza intemporal são incomensuráveis à medida da temporalidade humana. O que pode passar por uma banalidade é-o menos quando consideramos que os construtores de certos locais megalíticos do neolítico tal como Nabta Palya (Alto Egito) de 6000 a 6500 anos a.C., ou Stonehenge (Wiltshire, Inglaterra), 5000 a.C. viam já as mesmas estrelas que nós hoje em dia. Num noutro extremo e à nossa escala, para além de sentirmos e percebermos o envelhecimento do nosso corpo, a maneira mais imediata de sentir o fluxo da nossa temporalidade não é outra a não ser a nossa linguagem. Ela temporaliza não somente as ações e os cortes espaço-temporais nas quais nós evoluímos mas, sobretudo, ela temporaliza-nos existencialmente. A linguagem ancora-nos no tempo e faz de nós seres para os quais a existência é literalmente ritmada pela sua temporalidade.
Quando eles recorrem a sistemas de linguagens imaginárias, Detanico e Lain têm sempre o cuidado de não fazer invenções impossíveis ou ilógicas, já que elas seriam inoperantes se elas não tivessem ligações com a nossa linguagem, como o nosso corpo, com a nossa consciência do tempo. É aqui que nós tropeçamos de novo sobre a potência dos sistemas e dos seus constrangimentos. Ainda querendo-o, seriam eles ou seriamos nós capazes de sair da temporalidade que nos marca, que nos fixa e nos conduz? Podemos certamente imaginar uma temporalidade sem linguagem aquela dos animais é assim – mas o sentido ou a sensação do tempo não seria nunca abolida. Debaixo de uma aparência agradável e divertida que espicaça a nossa curiosidade, os jogos sonoros e visuais que propõem Detanico e Lain têm precisamente toda a seriedade da aparência: ela não é e não permanece mais do que aparência. E se tentarmos desfazer ou refazer esta aparência, esta forma-se precisamente na sua deformação. Está aí o mais terrível dos constrangimentos, o mais eficaz dos sistemas.
Jacinto Lageira
[tradução do francês: Liliana Coutinho]
Published in the Catalogue of the 26º Bienal de São Paulo.
They create typographical fonts and invent alphabets. They see space as points and lines. They probe cities horizontally and vertically. They alter distances, rhythms and proportions. They compress and expand sound waves. Nothing is fixed, not a single matrix. Pixel by pixel they extend landscapes right up to the edges of the monitor. They subvert the bellicose objectives of the videogame. They have the power to realign the geopolitical map in a minute. Here come the hackers who are operating within the legality of art.
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain interrogate signs as a system capable of representing reality. Although this is a practice dating back to the philosophy of Plato, it is as if each new work by the pair had come into existence to suggest that much has yet to be said about language, science and the city. While the problem of representation has existed throughout history, we must also acknowledge that time has modified its modulation. Writing in their own creation of a font also called Utopia (2001) generates unprecedented yet virtually real crossing-points between the projects of Niemeyer and metropolitan chaos: modernism neither succumbs to fences and sentry boxes, nor do these excrescences ignore their foundations. The user constructs his or her own plot, following the presets of the ceaseless contradictory movement of urban life.
The world is presented as one vast text, permanently being deciphered. Camouflaged under the pilling up of identical objects, words and ideas reveal themselves only to those willing to learn their codes – Pilha (2003) is a form of writing, a bad habit, a virus releasing the contagious energy of its interpretative quest. Using the technology of the digital and entertainment industries, the artists insert the instance of simulation between the traditional categories of phenomenon and copy. In Seoul/Killing Time (2003), which they call “the video of a desertion”, our expectation of fight scenes is thwarted by a harmless flight over a ghost city later translated into an architectural model. Suddenly, disobeying commands is within our grasp. What if the crowds were to learn of the accidental opening that this game provides? What if “if…” became real?
Na Viena dos anos 20, o filósofo e cientista social Otto Neurath imaginou um sistema visual de comunicação por meio da representação pictográfica de personagens, objetos e ações. O Isotype – International System of Typographic Picture Education – pretendia-se mais imediato, intuitivo e universalizante do que as línguas escritas, ainda que concebido à sua imagem. Como um reflexo gráfico do mundo, os pictogramas do microcosmo de Isotype recombinam-se para representar diagramaticamente fatos, narrativas e estatísticas, simplificando a mensagem a traços essenciais que corresponderiam à experiência concreta da realidade. De uma realidade única e universal: Neurath acreditava que seu sistema prescindiria de um aprendizado prévio e transcenderia as fronteiras culturais, tornando-se “a basis for a common cultural life and common cultural relationship”.
O modernismo então inspirador de Isotype recobriu-se hoje com o pó do pós. A idéia de realidade fragmentou-se e a utopia da perfeição planejada – e controlada – diluiu-se na modernidade líquida dos nossos tempos. Impossível tudo prever. Os pictogramas de Neurath mostraram-se insuficientemente intuitivos, condicionados a padrões culturais e pouco econômicos para que seu sistema substituísse a linguagem verbal, como sonhara. Mas o projeto de Isotype não deixou de se realizar: a representação visual de idéias e objetos é amplamente utilizada em casos como a sinalização de locais públicos. Hoje, descendentes de suas criaturas povoam aeroportos, restaurantes, repartições. A comunicação imagina-se a partir de sua herança.
Na constatação da distância entre idealização e realização, o sentido da palavra utopia desliza do mito de um estado ideal para a ironia de uma realidade irrealizável. Os projetos de transformação são transformados à medida que transformam; o erro, o imprevisto, o improviso fazem sua obra. O factual desdenha as categorias: os contraditórios convivem , articulam-se, complementam-se. É neste território entre a descrença e a aceitação que situamos Utopia, tipografia criada em 2001como retrato da obra arquitetônica modernista na paisagem das grandes cidades brasileiras, hoje.
Na São Paulo dos anos 2000, as linhas limpas dos projetos modernistas convivem com a massaroca dos cabos de alta tensão. Os espaços abertos fecham-se em cercas. Câmaras de vigilância, guaritas de segurança, caçambas e gambiarras espalham-se pelas ruas para preencher as lacunas do planejamento urbano e social. Cidade em constante transformação, playground de skatistas e campo de catadores de papel, São Paulo é um cenário que se reconstrói em velocidade que escapa a roteiros. Como ela, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte ou Brasília constituem-se em paisagens complexas onde o rigor modernista coabita com a aparição descontrolada de elementos urbanos espontâneos, caóticos, improvisados.
Criamos Utopia como um retrato líquido dessa contaminação. Os elementos urbanos, representados em pictogramas, combinam-se como letras de um texto para descrever graficamente a experiência real das cidades brasileiras. Projetos de Oscar Niemeyer impõem-se como ícones do modernismo; cercas, faixas e grades infiltram-se como símbolos das respostas da população às próprias necessidades. Organizados na forma tipográfica, estes ocupam as caixas baixas, aqueles as altas. Não sem ironia. E se organizam em um sistema de elementos a ser utilizado, um retrato em potência, um mapa que se redesenha cada vez que a tipografia é empregada. Para imaginar cidades puramente modernistas, utopias em caixas altas, ou esboçar emaranhados urbanos de caixas baixas. Ou ainda escrever topografias onde o previsto e o inesperado, o controle e o acaso, o projeto e a gambiarra, sobrepõem-se e transformam-se. Estas, nossas versões prediletas.
“We cast doubt on categories, the separation between reality and fiction, between the individual and the collective, between form and content, between the beginning, the middle and the end”
– Angela Detanico and Rafail Lain
Thierry de Duve starts provocatively with the following observation in “Reflections on the crisis in art and the reality of design”: whereas the bidet is a piece of sanitaryware which has not yet appeared in the museum of art, we cannot say the same for the urinal, which a certain R.Mutt named Fountain. In the words of de Duve: Any self-respecting museum of modern art, including the Pompidou Centre, today owns a replica of this . The Brazilian artist Ana Maria Tavares has already dealt with the problem of the dissolution of boundaries between design and the visual arts with her sculptures inspired by urban furnishings (for example seats on the metro, gym equipment, airport stairs, car mirrors) which she “camouflaged” in the exhibition space amongst architectural features such as columns and leaning rests. Artistic circles immediately rejected her work, which denotes a negative reaction to an artistic form with its origins in applied art, considered inferior to fine art. It is an old story which goes beyond the question of “promiscuity” between aesthetic categories. There will be no shortage of pessimists who denounce the “anything goes” view of art and who will say that this phenomenon has simply moved into the field of design, a sufficiently “middle class” stamping ground that it welcomes any utensil, packaging or production whether is conceptually effective or not.
Commentators need a rare versatility when considering the projects of the two Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. Even if they belonged exclusively to the world of art or the world of graphic design, it would still not be an easy task, given the profusion of hybrid processes which they use and which can just as easily make use of rudimentary skills as cutting edge technology. Let me relate an anecdote which highlights the tension between what we call design and what is understood by “contemporary art”. As part of the “Methods of Use ” exhibition of which I was curator, these artists developed an alphabet called Pilha (Pile (or stack, battery, reverse) ) which they defined as follows: “a system of writing which stacks identical objects (…). One object corresponds to the letter “a”, two to “b” and so on in alphabetical order . Each work, or group of words, had a material corresponding to them, the latter selected with as much finesse as when a painter chooses a colour. The expression “peu a peu” (little by little) was, for instance, constructed in a way which gave meaning to the wooden boxes which contained little plants, all of the same species, and these in turn required the gallery staff to provide daily maintenance to continue their growth during the period of the exhibition.
However, when I decided that this work ought to be exhibited against the front wall of the gallery’s white cube, Detanico and Lain were opposed to this, stating that I was subverting their “writing” project. In other words, they feared that the boxes placed on top of one another were being treated as formal sculptures – a mistaken response which the artists wanted to avoid at all costs – whereas their intention was to distribute the “texts” in unexpected places in order to leave the public in doubt about the nature of these “piles”. A notice at the entrance to the gallery gave all the information necessary to anyone who wanted to understand this “alphabet” of objects. Other “visual phrases” were distributed by the gallery: bricks arranged on top of one another articulated the expression “Antes de mais nada” (“most of all”) whilst rubber erasers carefully evoked three words which contradict the idea of erasing writing: “Mais uma vez” (“once more time”). For this exhibition I also presented the artists’ work by placing it in the constructivist tradition of concrete poetry, which was of major importance in Sao Paulo thanks to the poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos .
How are Detanico and Lain today siding with reading in a society which is actually organised by images ? It must be said that the Pile project created an irresistible dependency in those who appreciated it, causing them to gather objects in order to add a different meaning to them – in fact, to construct modest “concrete poems”. Thanks to the alphabet code, all these “piles” (in the street, in the kitchen, in the toilets) could then be accepted, ie things could have a conscience and the power of the world a context.
That said, we could ask whether this strategy is a teaching strategy. At first glance, yes. This resembles “let’s play learning, counting and reading”. However, what is not normally part of teaching is encouraging a desire to decode, subverting the traditional relationship between the signifier and the signified. It is also, moreover, the presentation of a way of imagining a reality for art in which the (mental) participation of the public prevents a descent into empty tautological form.
With the exception of advertising design, whose objects have different specific roles, what does it mean, to rephrase Plato’s idea, to be a “wordsmith (…) who, with eyes shut to the natural name of each object, is capable of imposing form on it in letters and syllables ? The profession of graphic designer, which I had the pleasure of following by inhaling the benzine of rubber adhesive and doing battle with pages of Letraset, has reached an incalculable level of specialisation. In twenty years the universe of graphic signs has allowed itself to be captivated by a revolution in the arrangement of texts, titles, illustrations, lines, dashes, boxes and vignettes. This is not a naïve apology which underestimates the primacy of the graphic project in relation to the legibility of the content. This phenomenon is inflicted by some graphic designers on readers because they tint their pages in dark colours, they increasingly reduce the typographical characters and they mix different styles without criteria. The computer and all the software which can be inserted in it (Photoshop, to quote the most common example) ought to serve as tools, pure and simple. Photoshop is not in itself a language. Without any rigorous aim (from an aesthetic, technical, moral and political point of view) it becomes a perverse toy, responsible for publications whose gloss refracts the reading matter. Worse still, its use in architecture gives ever greater form, at least in Brazil, to characterless buildings combining circles, cement, brick and glass in a hopeless hotch potch which results from a childish fascination with this digital tool.
Detractors of economic rationality, hunched over questions of under-employment and precariousness, would certainly affirm that the designer’s work has never been so close to the dream of independent work. And, it must be said: the graphic designer in modern society is not without his uses. According to the Bauhaus ideal, he is in a position, thanks to a (post-industrial) digital aesthetic, to play a role which, although pleasant, can testify to an ideological role; that is to say, it can mobilise a system of convictions outside of institutional interests. Which is what happens when you analyse Seoul/Killing Time (2003), defined by Detanico and Lain as being the “video of a desertion”. The game of destroying a city is replaced by an inoffensive flight above a ghost town. Then, to construct the model of the city, the artists have projected its map and photograph onto a computer screen from various different viewpoints. The result overturns the objectives of war which are too often mixed in with the entertainment industry. In January 2004, invited to pay homage on the 450th anniversary of the city of Sao Paulo, Detanico and Lain created Grifos nossos (our underlinings) for a special booklet edition of the newspaper Folha de S.Paolo: the operation consisted of appropriating, at the page set-up stage, words chosen from authors’ texts, by underlining them in yellow, which resulted in the production of a “design”, a sort of apparently haphazard punctuation from one page to another, the project concluding with an “infiltrated” paragraph, written precisely from the linear juxtaposition of other people’s words gathered during the reading process (an operation which is reminiscent of a “pile” but in a horizontal direction).
For Detanico and Lain, being responsible for a graphic project means that nothing is neutral and a brand name must be printed in the choice of typography (sometimes this consists of minimal changes, as in the case of Helvetica concentrated, a project which could be a joke about the way in which the Internet has subjugated its users) or changing into “texts” image marks such as in Mundo alinhado (aligned/justified world, 2004). The problem thickens when you begin to understand that in Detanico and Lain’s sense there is only a small, or perhaps no possibility at all of understanding oneself outside of language. If the world is obvious, saying so presupposes perception and apprenticeship. In this sense, the duo’s work is indebted to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
It is true both that the world is what we see and yet that we have to learn to see it. In this sense firstly that we have to match this vision by knowledge, taking possession of it, saying what is meant by we and what is meant by seeing, acting, therefore, as if we knew nothing about it, as if in this respect we had everything to learn .
Such “difficulties” and “contradictions” in the work of Detanico and Lain do not rule out the presence of a silence which rejects interpretation of their signs. Certain layers of meaning are not even touched upon. It is like taking one further step in Lacanian discovery in which the unconscious is structured as a language, towards the “inadequate” nature of this language which was previously all-powerful: the “outside”, our external reality, is filled with meaning, but nothing in any of this guarantees us access to it. The unconscious is both finite and infinite at the same time, this is the charm of this discovery. The act of “decoding”, for Detanico and Lain, is a means of touching the world with the laws of vision and the attention which one pays to items in the world. In this way neither the desert nor the plain would lack an appropriate name; neither would an illness, a love affair, a sunflower. For everything, there is a word, a sign or even several (the Greeks, for instance, would offer a number of different etymologies for certain words). For readers passionately interested in the clarity of legibility, this type of thought reaches its critical, even most anguished moment with Fonte/Delta (Source.DElata, 2002), a project which the artists describe thus:
Fonte/Delta is a typography which portrays language as a system of transformation; in the same way that language is modified by usage, the letters of “Delta” redraw themselves when they are applied. “Delta” is a generative typology. The way the letters are drawn is progressively transformed by generative standards. The computer file of typography is programmed to apply the standards in a random way. The way the letters are drawn varies over time and from one person to another .
We only need to see a text written in “Delta” to understand that there is a “perceptive faith” involved in making the world and the word coincide, even if the matrix of this world breaks down (let us not forget that the word is an image). In this case, the “generative” and the “degenerative” are dangerously user-friendly. Like a virus.
This type of “figuration” belongs to Platonic reasoning; the fact of attributing a social use to the transformation of language was a theme which occurred as early as Plato’s Cratylus. For Detanico and Lain, all supports are welcome: language can be created from a linguistic or infralinguistic system, from a sonorous rhythm or a visual symbol, an artificial code or gesticulations, instructions transmitted to a computer, the mathematical lexicon or the game played for entertainment. The infinity of this chain only serves further to highlight artists’ resistance to dogma. Each new work revives the dialogue between Socrates and Hermogenes reported by Plato and shows that Socrates’ conclusion remains sovereign:
Cratylus is correct in saying that names belong naturally to things, and that not everyone can be a wordsmith, but only to a person who, with eyes fixed on the natural name for each object, is capable of imposing form on it by letters and syllables.
However, what happens when we analyse, through this prism, the case of Utopia (Utopia, 2001), a computer typology in which the capital letters reproduce the modernist projects of architect Oscar Niemeyer, whilst the lower case letters carry the elements of urban life which are out of control (barriers, sentry boxes, signposts etc.)? In this case, Socrates’ proposition is unsustainable: (…) it is clear that things in themselves have a certain permanent being which is neither relative to us nor dependent on us .” If, on the one hand, the problem of representation persists in history, we must acknowledge on the other hand that time modifies its existence. Writing in “Utopia” typography produces virtually real cross-overs between Niemeyer’s projects and the indeterminate nature of urban space: modernism neither succumbs to barriers and sentry boxes nor are these excrescences unaware of their foundations. For them, “perceptive faith” in coexistence persists.
This belief is only overturned in Mundo alinhado (Aligned world, 2004), the work of Detanico and Lain produced specially for the 26th Biennale in Sao Paulo. With a simple touch on the keyboard (in semiotic terms it would be possible to read “keyboard” and “leisure” simultaneously) the artists generate several geopolitical maps. The map, with which we are familiar, is described as “aligned/justified” in the same way as a text which on the computer screen goes from left to right on the page. Taking seriously the artifices of programmes for page set-up to which graphic designers have made readers accustomed, Detanico and Lain then call up other cartographic versions Mundo centralizado (World centralised), Mundo alinhado a direita (World right aligned/justified) and Mundo alinhado a esquerda (World left aligned/justified). The term “alignment/justification” which is no less a variation of “piles” has strong political resonance, “aligned” countries being those which share the same ideology. “Left” and “right” on the other hand have lost their meaning and have made the possibility nowadays of separating supranational communities into societies governed by the state or by capital ironic. In Mundo justificado (World justified), boundaries, although constantly disputed, mimic the idea of a “model” map, their governments and people wisely hidden. But in all worlds, and none can be called “the best of worlds”, each region also receives a black line, whether shorter or longer. The backlight, when lit up, illuminates a configuration which strongly resembles a morse code translation (therefore a language of war). Or put another way: each world (or each text) retains the essential features of the organisation which we represent mentally as “the globe” at the point at which we can still recognise it, whilst knowing that the destiny of this map is just as random as a graphic mark and that it can be plated (homogenised) until it becomes a virtual image. The world of lack of differentiation or “the Empire” according to other authors; it is no longer the name which is important but its manipulation. This is perhaps the most critical of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain’s projects.
Lisette Lagnado is Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sao Paulo, an art critic and independent commission member.
Vire o monitor. (não tenha medo)
Esqueça a janela. (qualquer janela)
Negue todas as molduras. (inclusive os frames)
Ignore a fonética. (sim, você pode falar sem ela)
Desfigure as imagens. (é possível enxergar, sabia?)
Experimente desenquadrar, empilhar, mover (o mundo, o globo, seus olhos).
Pronto?
Não responda sim. Diga sempre não. (nunca pós, nem pré, nem anti, muito menos pró…)
Fale somente assim. Veja assim (e também assado). Pense assim (pense, pense, pense muito): Não-vídeo, não-imagem,
não-web, não-arte, não-CD-ROM, não-arquitetura, não-game, não-quem, não-não.
Pronto?
Plaf!
Entre.
Angela Detanico e Rafael Lain operam por desconstrução. Elaboram universos temporários que desafiam as formas de identificação dos limites entre visível e invisível e dos horizontes de legibilidade, independentemente da plataforma e/ou interface que escolham.
Tipografia, design gráfico, vídeo, arquitetura, internet, CD-ROM são alguns dos formatos já contemplados pela dupla que não usa suportes, mas transforma artefatos e dispositivos midiáticos em modalidades discursivas de diagramas instáveis.
Enunciam uma cultura de apropriação que se faz na contramão da sampleagem. Em seus projetos tipográficos, por exemplo, instauram uma dinâmica na qual o paradigma do remix torna-se um movimento de entrega.
Afinal, para que servem fontes senão para serem usadas por outros, em textos de autores diversos, que apagam a mão do criador original da letra em novos tecidos discursivos?
Exercício de generosidade intelectual, copyleft sem bandeira, várias de suas criações na área de tipografia foram reunidas em um curioso CD-ROM. “Entre” (2001) é o seu nome e traz embutido no título algumas das suas chaves de leitura.
Entre, no caso, é mais que um comando. É um convite e um desafio. Convite porque nos chama a não pensar em mais nada além de incursionar no seu universo particular. Um desafio porque nos faz, a todo momento, titubear ao tentar defini-lo.
Trata-se de um projeto que fica entre a escrita e a fala, entre a música e o desenho, entre a letra e o dígito. Sem explicações, dá-se ao leitor por meio de duas possibilidades: tocar imagens, desenhando com sons, utilizando aleatoriamente o teclado do computador, ou instalar uma série de 26 fontes.
Na primeira situação, escolhe-se um fragmento de um dos desenhos dos autores, que vêm encartados como miniposteres junto com o CD, e, ao iniciar a digitação, começa-se a processar novas formas, ao mesmo tempo em que se compõe uma trilha sonora, dando cor ao áudio e som aos traços.
Mas não é só esse campo entre o áudio e a visão que interessa. As fontes também sofrem um tratamento rigoroso para que se posicionem nesse universo de fronteiras fluidas em que se interceptam tipografia, imagem e som, num processo de recombinação de linguagens que assume um perfil deleuziano, evidente na própria epígrafe do CD, que cita uma passagem de “Mille Plateaux”:“Há ritmo desde que haja passagem transcodificada de um para outro meio”.
Um axioma que é levado ao limite na fonte “Utopia”, criada a convite da revista “Big” para compor um número especial dedicado a Oscar Niemeyer, feita com miniaturas de projetos do arquiteto, como o Memorial da América Latina (SP) e o Palácio da Alvorada (Brasília), e ícones dos resultados da falta de planejamento que prevalece nas grandes metrópoles brasileiras.
Às letras maiúsculas ficaram reservadas as belas linhas que tornaram a arquitetura de Niemeyer internacionalmente conhecida. Às minúsculas, placas que remetem a congestionamentos sem fim, grades que pretendem impedir a ocupação dos viadutos pelos sem-teto, entre outros signos de nosso horror urbano…
Propositadamente, as letras minúsculas foram construídas em quadros mais largos do que as maiúsculas e, por isso, quando digitadas em conjunto, seguindo as regras básicas da ortografia, fazem com que as minúsculas (os dejetos urbanos) subam, literalmente, em cima das maiúsculas (as formas da arquitetura modernista).
Emerge daí um texto que aparece como um tecido social sujo, em que o impasse entre o rigor e a beleza modernista e sua fragilidade para enfrentar o descontrole do crescimento urbano torna-se a chave de leitura de parte de nossa história recente, imprimindo tensões urbanas às frases, sem apelar a qualquer recurso vernacular.
Misturando referências diversificadas, que vão de zuzana licko (tipógrafa do famoso estúdio californiano Emigre) ao traçado revolucionário de El Lissitzky, “Entre” é um CD que desincumbe o design de qualquer função suplementar.
Não se desenha aqui apenas o que não se pode dizer com palavras. Tampouco dá-se à escrita uma função de mediação entre a natureza e a razão. As relações não são de convenção.
Antes, fazem pensar, lembrando Derrida, que a conjunção das práticas da informação, da cibernética e das ciências humanas conduz a uma profunda subversão, em que a escritura aparece como “uma partilha sem simetria que desenha de um lado o fechamento do livro e, do outro, a abertura do texto”.
Texto que não é revelação de mensagem, mas processo de interrogação da possibilidade de mensagem, inquietação gramatológica que percorre todos os projetos de Angela e Lain, mas que ocupa “Pilha” (2003) de ponta a ponta.
Aqui, um sistema de escritura por objetos (re)traduz o que nos circunda em enunciados visuais que implodem a letra para dar volume à quebra da horizontalidade da linha. Funciona, basicamente, a partir de empilhamentos de objetos idênticos que, numa escala de 1 a 26, relacionam quantidades a valores fonéticos. Assim, 1 batata = a, 2 batatas = b, 26 batatas = z.
O espaço se dilui em possibilidades combinatórias, entre frases de cubos de açúcar, de livros, de vasos, soprando Deleuze, mais uma vez, entre diferenças e repetições, produzindo uma vertigem essencial que se efetua pela desestabilização da forma (relativizada pelo número) que se transforma em letra, desaparece no objeto e se apaga na sua especificidade para voltar como interrogação sobre não mais a possibilidade de mensagem, mas os possíveis da linguagem.
Algo que o vídeo “Flatland” (2003) expande e extrapola, fatiando pixels, pervertendo a lógica do quadro – do frame – para criar cores que não pertencem à palheta videográfica, viabilizando a visualização de tons pastel que não estão lá.
Documentário líquido, dilui a imagem em movimento em stills, transformando terras planas do delta do rio Mekong em múltiplos arco-íris animados pelo som murmurante das suas margens.
Margens do rio e da imagem. Bordas. Mais que isso. Dobras. Outra vez Deleuze…
A técnica (ferramenta) usada é simples. A tecnologia (produção de repertório cognitivo), complexa. A seqüência captada com uma mini-DV é decupada em fotos isoladas. Recurso banal do próprio programa de edição. As fotos, horizontais, são então recortadas verticalmente. Cada recorte é esticado até a largura do quadro original. Nascem os arco-íris improváveis que triangulam a visão como queria ver (e nos ensinou a enxergar) Merleau-Ponty.
Como ver “Flatland” e não lembrar do mestre do visível (Merleau-Ponty, é preciso dizer?!), que nos ensinou a perceber a magia das figurações do “instante do mundo” que Cézanne queria pintar?
Aquele instante louco que há muito já passou, não volta, mas nunca passa, porque se faz e refaz em todas as rochas que estão e não estão nas montanhas de Santa Vitória que esse poeta da luz, Cézanne, pintou para desequilibrar tudo aquilo que entendíamos como cor, luz, sombra, figuração.
Gesto nobre e desdenhoso que volta – com tudo – nas cores, na paciência, na luz, no desdém de “Flatland”. A terra plana que se ergue em relevo do pixel esculpido em cor que não tem e não retrata.
Um movimento se anuncia aí. Para voltar impiedoso no gesto agressivo, sutil e inóspito que se impõe em “Seoul/Killig Time” (2003). Fina ironia. Macabra. Arrogante. O retrato do mundo dos games. Balelas. Chatices. Falcatruas.
Uma cidade desterrada – pelas corporações do entretenimento fashion. Palco de uma cena insólita. Aviões aterrissando no território de uma cidade que se transforma em mero espaço de ação de jogadores estúpidos. Ali acontece a quebra da regra: o jogo idiota vira história de uma deserção.
Contra a norma da babaquice e do paradigma da clicagem burra. De quem acha – ainda – que o mais interessante na cultura digital é reconhecer regras, atacar e vencer.
Contra a retórica fetichista de levar os games a sério, Angela e Lain nos obrigam a tratar os games com são. Cenários – ideológicos – de uma motivação vulgar: matar, morrer ou ganhar.
Novamente a técnica é simples e a tecnologia, complexa. O jogo (belicista, machista, wasp) tem seu stage capturado por uma câmera de vídeo ligada ao computador. O stage é remodelado em 3-D – bem ao gosto do cliente burro/cego e se transforma em maquete do espetáculo da ignorância, onde temos suas premissas mais banais: Uma cidade sem escala e sem ninguém.
Fina ironia. Só ri dela quem é capaz de driblar o movimento do mundo. Digitalizar suas coordenadas, fazer um exercício de “world align” (2003)… Brincar com coordenadas. Mover o mapa – afinal somos globais, não? – para lá e para cá…
Está tudo na tela e não está…. Por isso é possível abstrair a topologia e redesenhar a geografia. Trabalhar com as linhas de um desenho, em vez de ceder à dureza dos territórios. Num gesto simples e preciso, o mapa-múndi é dividido em linhas paralelas como se fosse uma página em branco, aberta à nossa conquista.
Tratado dessa forma, é possível submetê-lo às regras da edição do texto, deixando que os continentes se alinhem – à direita, no centro, à esquerda – seguindo as beiradas do monitor, sem nunca parar, sempre em loop, fugindo à regra orbital e a todas, comportando-se como matéria arquitetônica pronta a ser modificada pelos acidentes e pela história.
Fazer da arquitetura plano de mudança (não a ação da mudança) é também um dos pressupostos recorrentes de Angela e Lain, e que se evidenciam em projetos como “5 Times 10 Steps” (2003) e “Plaf!” (2004).
No primeiro caso, cinco escadas de tamanhos variados foram espalhadas pelo espaço expositivo do Palais de Tokyo, interagindo com o ambiente, tendo suas alturas determinadas por alguma característica do lugar em que se apóiam e os espaçamentos dos degraus definidos pelas suas respectivas alturas.
Diferença e Repetição, outra vez. Arquitetura relacional, da desconstrução e do acaso… Como em “Plaf!”, intervenção realizada na fachada da Galeria Vermelho em São Paulo, que invertia a posição do chão e da parede.
Ali também a técnica usada era simples e a tecnologia, complexa. Raspou-se a fachada branca até a revelação do concreto e projetou-se o que antes ocupava aquela mancha no chão, pondo em questão o papel da estrutura no processo de orientação do observador e dos cheios e vazios no funcionamento da máquina-casa. Desmanche de estruturas, perversão do olhar, empilhamentos, realinhamentos, interferência, apropriação, desconfiguração da fonética e umas poucas perguntas sem fim: O que é que você vê quando você vê? Como é que você lê o que você vê? Você lê?
Grifos Nossos. Grifos Deles.
fonte: Associação Cultural Videobrasil. “FF>>Dossier 001>>Angela Detanico e Rafael Lain”. Disponível em: <http://www.videobrasil.org.br/ffdossier/ffdossier001/portugues.htm>. São Paulo, abril de 2004.