Rosângela Rennó's Archival Disseminations:

You imagine, as does everybody else for that matter, that our organization has for many years been preparing the greatest document centre ever conceived, an archive that will bring together and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal and thing, by way of a general inventory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short a general and simultaneous history of everything, or rather a catalogue of everything moment by moment. And that is indeed what we are working on and we can feel satisfied that the project is well advanced: not only have we already put the contents of the most important libraries of the world, and likewise the archives and museums and newspaper annals of every nation, on our punch cards, but also a great deal of documentation gathered ad hoc, person by person, place by place.... What we are planning to build is a centralized archive of human kind, and we are attempting to store it in the smallest possible space, along the lines of the individual memories in our brains.

Italo Calvino (1)

All the world's photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy: "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne."

Roland Barthes (2)

In his short story "World Memory," Italo Calvino uses the fantasy of the total archive as a setting for a thriller in which reputedly neutral practices of archival organization become not only epistemologically biased but also criminal. The Director-who narrates the story to a man who, like the reader, never responds-defies the authority of the archive and its discriminating and classificatory criteria by surreptitiously introducing discarded little things. But what appears to be the beginning of a subversive intervention to diversify the contents of the archive soon becomes a search for power and control over others. Obsessed with his wife's infidelities, the Director decides to modify the archive to erase all memory of her and her past affairs - a plan that involves, among other things, getting rid of her lovers, who include the story's addressee. Thus, the monumental promises of order and memory embodied by the total archive, which will soon be all that is left of humankind, culminates in contradiction, arbitrariness, and the erasure of the listener to the story by the Director. Calvino's text illustrates another aspect of the relationship between the two conflicting forces that rule archival formation. The centrifugal force that erases, destroys, and expels archival matter is not only the result of unavoidable oblivion and error or the impossibility of undifferentiated inclusion but also the outcome of political and ethical decisions. When it comes to society, the archive always has a dark side, which is linked to its potential for discrimination and erasure against marginal or oppressed groups.

Barthes offers a more poetic approach to the madness of the archive, its secret inconsistencies, its opacities, its lacunae. In his view, the apparent chaos of the total photographic archive - all the images in the world - is not an obstacle but rather an opportunity for creative intervention and for the construction of alternative orderings. Once inside the global labyrinth of pictures, Barthes calls for a participatory form of reception that would allow an opening and activation of the archives buried inside the images, mobilizing their potential meanings. The key is to follow Ariadne by collectively weaving new narrative threads instead of focusing on a predetermined destination.

The Brazilian artist and photographer Rosângela Rennó conceives her work at the intersection of these two fictions about the potential uses of the archive. If Barthes is right and all the images in the world form a single labyrinth, Rennó sees herself as an Ariadne who incessantly complicates the terms of the search for the alleged monster at the center of the walled edifice of archival reason by taking unexpected directions, retracing her steps, questioning accepted filing criteria, introducing anomalous matter into the body of the archive, and incessantly and stubbornly deconstructing the dictates of sovereign power. Defying the laws of the archive, she works against the restricting and discriminating practices of the photographic archive in its different social and political configurations as police file, art museum, family album, and scientific data bank.

The focus of Rennó's interventions is in most cases the derelicta of the archive or the museum and everything that the recording apparatus expels or forgets; bad pictures, forgotten files, discarded or damaged photographs, wounded images-in short, visual garbage. Questioning the modernist understanding of photography in terms of authorship and aesthetic and technical innovation, Rennó considers the medium in terms of its production and reception while acknowledging its inherent reproducibility and deceptiveness. In her work, photographs are signs that acquire their meaning and value depending on the context, in relation to the place they occupy within the larger system of social and cultural coding-that is, in relation to the archive.

As is the case in the work of artists and photographers such as Tacita Dean, Joachim Schmid, Susan Meiselas, and Marcelo Brodskv, Rennó's performative and multimedia projects respond to what Hal Foster calls an archival impulse. In archival art, the figure of the artist joins that of the archivist in that his or her point of departure is the collection. The work is archival not only because it draws on formal and informal archives but also because it produces them "in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private” (3). Furthermore, it often arranges these materials according to an archival logic and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, usually adopting the format of the installation. According to Foster, the archival impulse assumes anomic fragmentation as "a condition not only to represent but to work through, putting forward new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional" (4).

Within this broader context, Rennó chooses to explore and scrutinize what we may call the “afterlife” of photographs - that is, the quiet existence of images that are no longer in use or circulation. To the extent that they no longer move or signify, they are dormant pictures buried in cemeteries of images. Rennó appropriates photographs and photographic artifacts such as albums and negatives that have become obsolete and recycles them by placing them into new signifying arrangements. They come from all sorts of archival formats, including family albums, public archives, newspapers, and professional photographic studios. Once in Rennó's possession, the photographs are manipulated and altered by digital means, by the addition of a pigment, by enlarging or cropping, by altering the saturation of color or manipulating the contrast between shadows and highlights. Her ever-expanding collection is not limited to conventional visual material. Her ongoing project O arquivo universal (1992-) comprises large numbers of narrative texts from newspapers that offer everyday stories centered on the private and public uses of particular photographs. They are seen as textual images in which photographs become material embodiments of memory, evidence, desire, or witnessing. Renno's archival projects unfailingly produce a blurring effect that calls attention to and at the same time complicates the reading of images, stretching the definition of what photography is and what counts as photography.

Rennó's systematic and irreverent appropriation of existing images channels her critical response to the contemporary overproduction and superficial consumption of images that we can no longer see or read. Confronted with the excess of images and an overgrown transnational archive spilling over every aspect of our existences, she stopped taking photographs and decided instead to focus on awakening the optical unconscious of available but discarded images through the construction of counterarchives. Her art is a series of archival actions in which photography functions as a "workplace" - a site of anamnesiac experimentation and critical recontextualization.

Playing with the intersections between the archive and the library, Rennó frequently realizes her works in at least two formats, as installations and as artist's books. This bifurcating procedure helps make visible different forms of spatial organization according to which the archive can alternate between an architectural structure or an album, a public site or a private scene for semiotic traffic. Splitting the work into parallel formats also opens the possibility of different forms of physical interaction and the active decoding of photographic images, which in Rennó's case remain both accessible and unreachable, always framed by layers of replication and material mediation.

Itinerancy is at the core of Rennó's archival impulse. Not only does her main modus operandi consist of putting images into motion while creating new paths for exchange and interpretation, but all her projects involve some form of movement, including flying to foreign countries and cities, visiting archival sites, trading photos with friends and collectors, and tracing particular types of photographic artifacts in flea markets around the world. More than simply obsolete coins of a common visual currency that has unified all subjects within a single global archival network of valuation and desire, her images transcend national and cultural borders, crossing over different mediums and genres and entering new visual configurations.

An archive of archives, Rennó's art not only involves a large number of visual materials from diverse archival formations but also explores their political power in the organization of private and social life by proposing an archaeology of the dominant visual discourses and apparatuses in modern society. By digging in the ruins of the archive, its hidden nooks and neglected accretions, she seeks to recover the photographic traces of the bodies of those who have been consigned to disappear within the hierarchical order of the archive - the infamous men and women whose lives are defined by their subjection to the disciplinary apparatuses of the state. By recovering the images of their obliterated bodies, her archaeological explorations question what institutional photography remembers and forgets, and for what purpose. In doing so, they destabilize the authority of the modern archive as a neutral technology of remembrance. Given the scope of her rewriting project, Rennó's archaeology is by definition a permanently incomplete task, a project always in progress.

Mimicking archival strategies of preservation and classification, Rennó treats her acquired photographic artifacts with new archival taxonomies in order to make visible the ways in which disciplinary institutions make people and their images "disappear." The archival project Vulgo (Alias, 1998-99), for example, consists of digital photographs made from reproductions of neglected glass negatives that Rennó retrieved from São Paulo's Penitentiary Museum in 1998. Taken with the purpose of putting together an inventory of prisoners' innate physical features, such as cowlicks, the original photographs were supposed to record the stigmata that, according to the grammar of phrenology and physiognomy, corroborated social degeneration and a predisposition to crime. By digitally altering the negatives, blowing them up, and coloring the markers of difference that they were intended to expose, Rennó deconstructs the discriminatory logic of police records, thereby seeking to return to the photographed marginal subjects their human singularity by revealing instead their political vulnerability, even while calling attention to the violent mediation of the photographic apparatus and its blind spots. In its conspicuous iterability, the red mark opens the images of the anonymous infamous men to another reading, beyond objectification.

In Bibliotheca (2002-3), the rescuing and restoring of orphaned images operates in the photographic space of bourgeois self-representation and private collecting. The project grew out of another branch of Rennó's archival impulse, her long-standing interest in and persistent quest for old photo albums and private slide collections, which she began to acquire at a flea market in Brussels in 1992. In the installation format, Bibliotheca treats the assembled archival objects as forgotten material artifacts of a scattered collective library. Organized as thirty-seven sealed vitrines containing one hundred albums and slide collections and covered by 1:1 scale digital color photographs of the vitrines' contents, mounted on Plexiglas, it adopts the architectural design of an archaeological exhibition, complete with a small filing cabinet with cards describing each of the objects on display and with a large world map on a wall marking the sites where they were found and gathered before they traveled to Rennó's studio in Brazil.

In its book format, Bibliotheca is organized according to a conceptual association that equates the book with the world. In dialogic opposition to the project O arquivo universal, a collection of fragmentary visual texts without images, the artist's book Bibliotheca is made of visual "quotations" from photo books, whose contents have been taken apart, reshuffled, rearranged, and replicated according to a visual poetics reminiscent of the compositional technique known as the exquisite corpse, practiced by the Surrealists and the Dadaists (5). But instead of relying on the serendipity induced by partial blindness, Rennó promotes a visual poetics that operates according to visible correspondences between ready-made photographic bodies. Since this technique can be applied indefinitely, at least in potentia, Renno's visual compendium could keep expanding forever.

As a book of books, or a photo archive made of smaller photo archives, Bibliotheca belongs to a genealogy of conjectural objects that, like Borges's spherical Aleph, seek to contain the totality of the universe within a single point or singular object. This genealogical connection already is alluded to in the title of the project. The anachronistic use of the Latin term bibliotheca refers to the Portuguese biblioteca (library) but above all quotes the title of an ancient work, Photius's book archive, written in the ninth century, which lists and summarizes all the books read by the patriarch of Constantinople during his brother's absence. Photius's list traces the eclectic contours of a ghostly library, most of whose contents have disappeared, leaving behind only an entry in his records (6). In a similar way, Rennó's archival photographs constitute the shadowy remains of collections of images and the life stories they conveyed, which, detached from the affective ties that made them signify, have become anonymous and meaningless to us. Even if they have not vanished like the patriarch's books, the fact that their language has fallen into oblivion has made them unreadable. Connecting anew the dormant photographs across time and space, Rennó mobilizes their encrypted meanings by creating new signifying threads and paths across the field of representation that run along repeating visual patterns, figures, and motifs. The results are aleatory sequences and visual correspondences that project the old images onto the screen of an anonymous collective memory: a baby sitting on a large chair looks at the camera next to the image of an old man who, by visual contagion, seems to have lived the rest of the baby's life on his behalf; the ruinous image of a newlywed couple posing for the camera in ceremonial attire next to another, more modern newlywed couple looking in their direction, trapped in an impossible time lag; family members unfailingly disciplined to stand for the camera around tables and family pictures; rows of picture IDs of men, women, and children, conspicuous in their seriality, their bodies dwarfed to the size of focused faces; photos of remote places and cities we would like to see; Venice framed repeatedly as a fixed set of tourist sites; bodies of water from unknown familiar places; diving swimmers frozen in midair for eternity; men in uniform forever at war; Asian women in pairs wearing traditional costumes; rainbows over modern cities that look like other modern cities; planes taking off from or landing in nonplaces; windows and mirrors framing a picture world made of reflections…

Leafing through Rennó's album of visual quotations, we experience the foundational paradox that defines the photographic archive, suspended between the domiciliation of the law and the indeterminacy of the image, which is always on the move, protean and resistant to fixation. The camera captures the world, translating everything into a massive repertoire of frozen images and prosthetic traces of what has already been. But the stillness of the archive is just a deceiving mask. It dissimulates the slow and continuous movement and transformation of images, which, silently and actively, keep entering and exiting the archive through its revolving doors.

  1.   Italo Calvino, "World Memory," in Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 135-36.
  2.   Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73.
  3.    Hal Foster, "An Archival Impulse," October, no. 110 (fall 2004): 5.
  4.   Ibid., 22. Foster suggests that the archival desire to connect disparate elements and objects may betray a paranoid dimension. Paranoia would be the other side of a utopian ambition, a "desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia" (ibid.).
5. Based on an old parlor game, the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) was a collective collage put together by several people, each of whom would write one or more words or draw an image on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution. This compositional method got its name from the resulting phrase obtained in initial playing among the Surrealists: "Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin /nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine).
6. For an insightful and detailed reading of Rennó's Bibliotheca as an apparatus of memory and mnemonic strategies, see María Angélica Melendi's excellent essay "Bibliotheca; or, On the Possible Strategies of Memory," in Rosângela Rennó: Bibliotheca (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2003), 37-49.