Mendes Wood DM - São Paulo, Brazil, 2012
From 14 November to 5 may 2012
see the project here
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 whole process can be seen through the blog and vimeo.
Bitácora of Letícia Ramos combines her production of
the last two years in multiple relationships with the imagination of adventure,
geographical romance and science ction; 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 wind - letter studies on
the expedition boat, notebooks, traces and evidence of eld 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- photography. The
explorer gure 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.
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 con ned 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 eld of the stone,
The
image of the stone, The map which is a stone.
Above all, in Bitácora, is given the con dence 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