Cicatriz

Rosângela Rennó belongs to a generation of young Brazilian artists who, while schooled in the photojournalistic and social documentary traditions of their native country, have opted to use photography in more experimental ways, embracing new artistic languages from the graphic arts, architecture, cinema, and design to expand the possibilities of the medium. Rennó, educated as both a fine artist and an architect, hails from Belo Horizonte, the third largest city in Brazil. Trained at Escola Guignard, an institution widely known for its emphasis on drawing over painting and sculpture, Rennó quickly moved on to adopt photography as her preferred medium. In the early 1980s, she gravitated toward the Brazilian conceptual movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially toward the work of Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Luiz Alphonsus, and Waltercio Caldas, whose art became at that time widely accessible through a series of publications sponsored by Fundação Nacional de Arte (National Foundation for the Arts) (FUNARTE) (1). The anti-establishment and combative tactics of Meireles, the experimental use of photolanguage and conceptual manipulations by Alphonsus, the predilection for artistic interventions directly on a journal's printed pages by Manuel, and the visual and verbal interplays of Caldas were instrumental in defining new directions for Rennó, whose interest in photography and the power of the image positioned her outside of traditional artistic expressions prevalent in 1980s Brazil.

Not easily categorized, Rennó's work was initially included in photography exhibitions; her first international appearances were in shows that dealt with contemporary Brazilian photography. In recent years, her work has been shown in exhibitions that deal more with contemporary strategies and issues and less with straight photography. Rennó's work involves the appropriation of found photography (I.D. photographs, snapshots, newspaper images, and more recently, a medical archive) to create pieces in which the issue of authorship is subsumed to the power of the anonymous image. She is more interested in the subject represented than in the formal qualities of the image or in knowing who took the photograph. Like Roland Barthes, Rennó believes that photographic recordings function as an antidote to human forgetfulness. In reconstructing memory Rennó does not dictate the subject matter, but rather takes what others - street or commercial photographers, photojournalists, family members, friends-have deliberately or unintentionally elected to immortalize.

Rennó's approach is deftly defined by Brazilian art critic Adriano Pedrosa as the “outing of private into public” (2). By using a term generally associated with gay activism (outing someone means publicly revealing his or her homosexuality), Pedrosa notes the charged nature of Rennó's work. Rennó's process of collecting, manipulating, enlarging, and framing images to exhibit them in a public art context can be read as a form of social activism aimed at giving voice to the otherwise disenfranchised. However, despite the role of social conscience that the artist seems to play, Rennó does not pretend to speak for or represent her subjects. Using her artistic platform, she merely summons attention to the perils of social amnesia and invites us to reflect upon the induced or unintended factors that caused it.

Rennó's politically charged installation, Atentado ao Poder-Via Crucis (An Attack on Power-Via Crucis) (1992) (4) was created in response to Rio 92 (The First Earth Summit), an event that preoccupied the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Photographs of the cadavers of thirteen people killed during the two-week period of the conference comprise the work. Roman numerals etched at the bottom of each photograph correspond to the stages of Christ's passion, and the inscription "The Earth Summit" hangs like an epitaph above the photographs. Atentado ao Poder-Via Crucis mocks the governmental and religious institutions of a world that, at the height of its powers, is incapable of eliminating endemic violence, inequity, and pollution.

Other works, such as Duas Lições de Realismo Fantásticos (5) (Two Lessons of Fantastic Realism) (1991), a commentary on the quasi-invisible role of women in Brazilian society, and Imemorial (1994), dedicated to the workers who lost their lives during the construction of Brasília, also reflect upon the fragility of memory. Both projects represent what Paulo Herkenkoff calls "fragmentary interruption[s] of amnesia" or “the retrieval of the subject in time, giving presentness to the past.” (6)

In Duas Lições de Realismo Fantástico Rennó installed a series of large-size portraits around the perimeter of a room, carefully placing the female images in front of the room's open windows. Illuminated from behind, these women seem more three-dimensional, and by extension, more real. Rennó argues that Brazilian society relegates the majority of women to a fantastic (unreal) position by insufficiently acknowledging their roles as mothers, wives, and professionals as integral to society. Their lack of voice and political power renders them invisible, making their occasional forays into the “real world” a veritable magic act.

Rennó obtained the photographs of the workers portrayed in Imemorial from employee I.D. cards. The work celebrates a group of unsung heroes whose lives were sacrificed to the construction of a modern city. A failed experiment in urban development, Brasília remains all but forgotten by the country's dominant Rio de Janeiro- São Paulo axis. Like the inert and disquieting images in Imemorial, Brasília has become a phantom monument to a dream gone awry.

Rennó's subtle yet relentless crusade against the loss of memory is also expressed through texts from the Universal Archive, (1992-1996) a collection of published articles from journals, magazines, and newspapers. Combined with images or by themselves, the stories convey a strong visual representation of human drama. The installation Candelária (1993), named after a church where a group of homeless children were massacred, consists solely of texts from the Universal Archive illuminated by fluorescent light. The blue light's coolness speaks of the cold-blooded manner in which the children, seen as expendable by a society ill-equipped to assimilate them, were murdered. The church, traditionally considered a sanctuary for the weak and dispossessed, was in this instance unable to save them from such a violent fate. A more recent work, also taken from the Universal Archive, addresses kidnapping. Its eight stories, presented in black letters over a black background, articulate the anguish of captivity and retain the immediacy of a situation that its victims would rather forget. Rennó's purpose is not to relive the traumatic nature of abduction, but rather to reflect upon the violation of the inalienable human right to freedom.

Cicatriz, a project Rennó conceived for MOCA, continues the artist's exploration of social amnesia. The installation consists of eighteen photographs depicting jailhouse tattoos, culled from a medical archive belonging to a penitentiary in Brazil, and twelve texts taken from the Universal Archive. Using the gallery walls metaphorically, Rennó "scars" the surface by cutting into the walls to insert the photographs and the texts at various heights and in different configurations. While the two components do not have direct associations, the subject of photography joins the seemingly disparate elements. Rennó intentionally pairs unrelated events to spur in the mind of the viewer unlimited free associations. She also chooses to de-individualize the subjects by cropping the photographs to exclude any identifiable characteristics the inmate's prison number, facial features and by replacing names in the texts with initials. Impossible to identify the protagonists of the numerous, unfolding stories, one can only attempt to reconstruct marginalized lives.

Rennó's working process involves a great deal of research, and Cicatriz has a scientific and analytic investigation at its core. The medical archive used for Cicatrizconsists of a cache of approximately 15,000 glass negatives. Taken between 1920 and 1940 at the Penitenciária do Estado at the Carandiru Complex in São Paulo, the photographs identify prisoners by number, physical characteristics (facial features, skin color, height, weight, and corporal deformities), and body marks (tattoos and self-inflicted or accidental scars). Neglectfully stored in ordinary cardboard boxes and languishing in varying degrees of decay caused by the humid climate, the archive has remained inaccessible and all but forgotten for over fifty years. In an attempt to at least partially rectify the damage, the project was conceived to include a conservation and restoration phase to stabilize the archive prior to using it in the exhibition. To this end, Rennó petitioned Penitentiary Academy of the State of São Paulo (ACADEPEN) in May of 1995 for access to and use of the material. Renno's application was initially denied based on a penal regulation that protects the identity of both the prisoners and their families from public scrutiny for a hundred years. However, Rennó discovered that some of the images had been published in a criminal treatise, thus rendering the confidentiality rule invalid, and ACADEPEN finally granted authorization in February 1996.

In consultation with FUNARTE, the University of São Paulo, and the Association of Brazilian Archivists, Rennó set up a studio on the ACADEPEN premises to conduct the tasks of sorting, selecting, and discarding unsuitable negatives, before cleaning, restoring, and cataloguing them. By nature, meticulous and time consuming, the process nonetheless provided the artist with the opportunity to do direct research about the effects of time and climate on glass negatives and the subsequent preservation and conservation procedures required. During the conservation phase, Rennó selected 1,800 plates. After careful consideration, she brought the number down to 240, from which she finally selected the eighteen used in Cicatriz.

The original black-and-white photographic plates were used to illustrate inmates' individual data entries in the penitentiary registry. Doctor José de Moraes Mello, the physician in charge of the operation, left no documentation that might shed light on the archive's other applications, if any. Despite intense research by the artist, no other explanation for its existence has been found. Under the title of "Penitentiary of the State of São Paulo, Service of Criminal Biotypology, Tattoo Archive," twenty-six leather-bound volumes contain over 6,000 pages documenting an equal number of tattoos. Each page contains the volume and entry numbers, followed by the prisoner's name, nickname, age, skin color, status, nationality, profession, religion, crime, and recidivism rate. Questions about

the tattoo itself - when, where, why, and by whom it was made, as well as its location and color - are also included. Below each photograph there are thirteen categories including ethnic, political, criminal, love, obscene, ornamental, accidental, and therapeutic, that are also used for classification. Brief notes alluding to the meaning of initials or the inmate's relationship to the female references are written on the back of the page. Significantly, prisoners rarely chose the tattoo design themselves, relying instead on the tattoo artist for its selection and execution, and the recurrence of certain designs attests either to the artist's fondness for particular motifs or to his limited skills. The tattoos shown in Cicatriz, then, arguably depict the artist's memories, and not those of the individual prisoners.

While it is clear that the tattoo images prevail, they are by no means the exhibition's sole focus. By avoiding any overt or veiled allusion to their meaning in society, or within the context of a criminal institution, Rennó directs the viewer's attention to the whole image, to the tattoos' likely connections with other elements in the installation, and to their formal qualities and beauty.

An ancient form of body decoration, tattooing has evolved from a marginalized art form into a widely accepted and popular practice. The tattoos in the Cicatrizinstallation lack the sophistication that contemporary designs have achieved. Their appearance brings to mind the crudely made instruments with which they were executed; some are very pale and hard to read, and the limited design repertory does not offer visual variety. Nonetheless, the tattoos possess a certain rough beauty brought about by a shift in the photograph's scale and color. Rennó prints the photographs several times larger than the originals, and their leaden look is achieved by printing a low contrast negative on a gray surface. In one example, the delicate lines present in the portrait of a beautiful and demure woman seem to be drawn with graphite instead of a needle. The skin's topography is incorporated into the design with the magnified texture of the epidermis taking on the appearance of canvas. Ultimately, the strength of the images lies in Rennó's ability to manipulate the photographic process, incorporating her own practices and experiences and other expressive means to transform a simple tattoo into a mysterious object.

The texts included in Cicatriz come from Rennó's Universal Archive. No more than a handful of lines long, each story becomes a link in a chain of human dramas with photography as the common denominator. Rennó's use of the letters Y., X., V. in place of names renders the characters entirely anonymous, lessening connotations about race, sex, and class. The protagonists' mutation into ambiguous beings alters the tenor of the story, bringing the subject of photography into prominence. After all, it is the camera that captures for posterity the passionate kiss that will in time become the subject of a lawsuit. It is also the camera that gives an impoverished organ donor evidence that the Australian wife vacationing in Switzerland has fully recovered after her kidney transplant. The images evoked in these snippets of text are as strong as the ones appearing in the photographs they reference. Rennó succeeds in providing an image with a story and a story with an image.

While Rennó's art is indebted to early twentieth-century traditions like Cubist collage in the use of found materials, and Constructivism in its belief that the artist can better society by entering into a dialogue with visual means of communication, it also confronts the postmodern issues of originality, information dissemination, and cultural assimilation. In recent years, Rennó has increasingly focused on creating installations with language at their core. Using a “cut-and-paste” (7) technique in which each element represents a different thought, Rennó mixes and matches images to create a larger meaning. Constructed on a loose grid, the installations can be seen - and read- from any point in the gallery. Varied dynamics are set into motion according to how the viewer elects to engage the art and what elements he or she chooses as a starting point. Moreover, the situations are linked to the place and culture where they happen. While the photographs are for the most part found in Brazil and deal with cultural situations inherent to that country, the texts are more international in nature. The alliance of the two elements reflects the interdependence that has developed among contemporary societies. However, photography remains Rennó's primary device. Taking advantage of photography's immediacy and descriptive language, Rennó preserves moments of life which she uses to "trigger associations for all of us, representing a memory that is collective rather than individual.” (8)

1.   Fundação Nacional de Arte (National Foundation for the Arts) was founded in the 1970s to promote Brazilian art. FUNARTE opened the first gallery in Brazil devoted solely to photography.
2.   Adriano Pedrosa, "Developing Identities," Poliester (Winter 1995): 45.
3.   Ibid.
4. Rennó's use of puns is evident in this and other titles. Atentado ao Poder (An Attack on Power) is a play on the phrase "atentado ao pudor" (an attack on decorum), an infringement on moral codes that is punishable by law in Brazil.
5. Duas Lições de Realismo Fantástico (Two Lessons of Fantastic Realism), is a direct reference to "magic realism," a term used to describe the work of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. With its blend of the real and the imaginary, "magic realism" aptly describes the surreal intensity of Latin America's reality.
6.   Paulo Herkenhoff, The Density of Light: Contemporary Brazilian Photography. Exh. cat. (São Paulo: Brazilian Book Chamber, 1993) 36.
7.   Dan Cameron, "Between the Lines," Rosângela Rennó. Exh. cat. (São Paulo: Galeria Camargo Vilaça, 1995).
8.   Mary Jane Jacobs, Introduction to Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness. Exh. cat. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1988) 12

RUIZ, Alma. Cicatriz. Exh. Cat. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1996.