2011-2012
See the project blog and vimeo.
Designed in 2011 under the Marc Ferrez Award of photographic creation, the Bitácora project studies the wind force scale developed by the british admiral Francis Beaufort, and its peculiar visual descriptions of the wind effect on the land and the sea. It was build a specific camera for filmmaking based on the research of the first wooden submarine, on the first polar explorations and on the Polaroid technology.
From this multidisciplinary experience was published the book “Cuaderno de Bitácora” that combines art, history, science and fiction, and talks about the creation of the low tech camera that was aboard the North Pole expedition.
The sailboat trip to the north Arctic began in October of the same year and, during the 20 days of artistic residency aboard, the artist recorded landscape samples, collected atmospheric data and made poetic and scientific notes on the landscape.
This research expedition resulted in a new series of works (photography, drawing, object and film) which together propose a kind of “geographical romance” of the Arctic region. The project was presented in the form of exhibition at the Mendes Wood – SP gallery.
Polaroid’s original were also displayed under the Photography Program at Centro Cultural São Paulo. The project also received the Brazil Photography Award – 2012 in the category of Contemporary Research.
The making of:
Book resulting from the photographic research of artist Leticia Ramos carried out by the Marc Ferrez Prize for photographic creation. Click here.
BITÁCORA RESIDENCY
See more of the residency here
BITÁCORA (Text by Marcio Harum)
Bitácora of Letícia Ramos combines her production of
the last two years in multiple relationships with the imagination
of adventure, geographical romance and science fiction;
full of sense, are put together here for this solo exhibition
her notebook of notebooks and the circumnavigation of the
Arctic Circle.
The show presents three working scales: Polaroids,
extensions (almost painting) and artifacts (barometric windletter studies on the expedition boat, notebooks, traces and
evidence of field trip) and videos.
Under the supernatural interference of the low
northern lights, high frequency of blue and green landscapes
made lean their cameras spontaneously capturing effects of
Super-8 sci-fi photography. The explorer figure that doesn’t
appear, only shows to the visitor his impressions of his
imagery traces Establishing contact between the nature
descriptions practiced by Captain Hátteras de Jules Verne in
his trip to the North Pole, blunts, from the collection of these
stops, the feeling of a new beginning for the world.
What is seen in the distance are relics and materials
testimonies walled between the past and the future, a
trail of the white predictable polar- colors of atmospheric
precipitations in the Arctic. One can understand the principle
of such a chromatic distortion when we closely observe the
wind chemical reactions caused by the high / low pressure
differences and by the air mass of hot air and cold white
clouds (water vapor).
For this exhibition the artist worked with repeating
scales in blocks, between small and large movements, they
seem different but are confined to the same split second
frames. Ideally it looks like Letícia Ramos seeks an impossible
synthesis of being worked, to have only one scene, as if she
was trying to found a new place through a single image,
and thus discover the organic-etymological origin of a new
imagined continent, its time history, the progress,
The landmark of the stone,
The field of the stone,
The image of the stone,
The map which is a stone.
Above all, in Bitácora, is given the confidence to
really believe the images that are shown from the construction
of own optical devices (and not or maybe how to show
everywhere images to be displayed).
Marcio Harum
2012