Living Things

[and the Unlettering by Stone]

An unlettering by stone: through columns;

to unlearn from stone, to photograph it.

Could this be a possible transcreation of the first two lines of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poem Education by Stone, brought into Rosângela Rennó’s photographic universe? What else might be at stake in the resemblance between these two artists, whose practices and poetic interventions in the world carry a a metacritical bias of high metamorphical charge?

On one hand, the figures imagined by the Pernambucan poet regarded as unmatched descriptions in the history of Brazilian poetry render his literary work far more visual and imagistic than auditory. On the other hand, the procedures through which Rennó produces images reveal a continuous exercise in grasping the social, cultural, and political dimensions of contemporary reality, alongside the active use of writing (both textual and imagistic), in order to equip us with tools for a critical reading of the world. An exercise also known as literacy.

Rennó’s visual literacy follows alternative routes of revision and confrontation with photography’s ontological premise: compiling and selecting archival images rather than creating new ones; using negatives and slides instead of exhibiting photographic prints; or dissolving all sharpness of the image through coverings, reflections, filters, and other erasures.

Moreover, the visual and literary interventions that constitute her work allow us to recreate and reflect on political scenarios and historical moments—military coups, civilian massacres, collective resistances—that are unique yet retain certain traces of a photographic landscape marked by violence. When transmitted from generation to generation, these traces remain operative, alive, reinforcing both the political status of photography and its imperial premise.

In Living Things [and the Unlettering by Stone], Rennó precisely engages the photographic element of this long-duration colonial landscape, which stretched across Portuguese territory and overseas, encompassing Brazilian lands and figures on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the work Cinco Pedros [Five Peters], for instance, Rennó manifests photographic multiplicity by evoking the real continuity of Portuguese history through the coronation of five individuals named Peter. Each, in their own way—whether Peter the Just/Cruel, Peter the Pacific, Peter the Sexton, or Peter the Liberator — personifies the Royal House of Portugal. The photographic correspondence lies in recurrence: the reminder that, just as there were many Peters, there was not a single beginning to the history of photography, but rather multiple beginnings dispersed in time: not only 1839, but also 1492, 1938, 1798, 1908, 1808, and 1888, dates that concentrate knowledge and symbolic power in the maintenance of the historical regime. It is Rennó’s task to expose these nearly nine hundred years of institutionalized fiction.

The Portuguese spatio-temporal extension also asserts itself through the photographic element, which operates as an imperial technology in the production of artefacts such as landmarks, documents, records, and proofs. This expansion whether through the use of violence in the forced recording of captive groups or through the co-optation of civil rights in the image of the other, emerges in the hypothesis that “while mapping imperial space, photography also served to erase it, and that the loss of this place through vision may have been another attempt to forestall the disenchantment of the world.”* The frieze Gabinete do Crime (2024/2025) stands as clear proof of this doubtfulness, and the human scale of the work compels viewers to confront the polyptych and its operative forces, made present in multiple ways, all the more with its treasure — its gold — still concealed.

Returning to stone: to unlearn from stone, to photograph it. Writing with light, just as writing with stone, is a device that reminds us that history and literacy are dynamic and, therefore, reversible. What, then, is to be done when stone takes the form of columns, of urban equipment and furniture, of markers of recognition and invasion of territories, of monuments and pillories? From Cabral’s metacritique to the records of the sessions of the “Portuguese Cortes”** a stone — whether as figure of speech or as object — releases us to undertake a dynamic of photographic unlettering: to unlearn world history in order to experiment with a potential history.

In Rennó’s case, photography’s strictly documentary appreciation is at the very least ambiguous, contrasted. If, on one hand, photography invokes the treatment of authentic representation that confers fidelity, capable of scientifically recording the vast spread of pillories throughout the Portuguese colonial territory, on the other hand, the violent equivalence between photography and pillory as two measures of that same imperial territory comes forth in Coisas Vivas (2023–2025). These columns, monumental and invisible, are scattered across lands held to be, in Daguerre’s words, the tropical home of photography, affirming that his invention would work best in the “South,” in places with greater intensity of sunlight, such as Spain, Portugal, Africa, and so forth. With Hercule Florence, we know that Brazil also falls within this geo-photo-graphic metaphor.

Because of all these “pedras e Pedros”***, Rennó’s literacy becomes unlettering. Unlettering by stone is a process in which unlearning involves not only resilience in the face of adversity and gusts of wind; the hard stone that receives the blows of soft water makes it evident that expressing language, like the phenomenon itself, are different when shaped by the waters of the colonies.

André Pitol

October 2025

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* In the Portuguese original: “enquanto mapeava o espaço imperial, a fotografia também servia para apagá-lo, e que a perda desse lugar através da visão talvez tenha sido outro intento de impedir o desencantamento do mundo” in Natalia Brizuela. Fotografia e Império: paisagens para um Brasil moderno. 1º ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012, p. 20.


** Cortes is a representative assembly, or parliament, of the medieval Iberian kingdoms and, in modern times, the national legislature of Spain and of Portugal. (Source: brittanica.com)


*** Translator’s Note: In Portuguese, pedras (stones) and Pedros (the proper name Pedro, equivalent to Peter in English) resonate not only through alliteration but also through etymology: Pedro derives from the Greek Pétros (Πέτρος), meaning stone or rock. The essay therefore preserves the phrase pedras e Pedros in the original, allowing this layered play between materiality and genealogy to remain audible.