Solo exhibition

coleção moraes-barbosa, São Paulo

31.01 - 04.03.2024

At the beginning of the 21st century we are witnessing the hyperbolisation of everything that was advertised and sold to us in the previous century: technological obsolescence, the speed of information, fleeting relationships, the horizontality of the fabric of knowledge, all conspiring against the time of the clock, which seems to have shrunk at the impact of everything for the first time.

We're always in a hurry and even when we're travelling, we're in a hurry: time must be optimised and the time we dedicate to experiencing the landscape is becoming too short, even if we want this interaction to be long-lasting and therefore profound. Today we can use social media to share evidence of our insertion into a new landscape. However, the resulting effect is always more ephemeral than the experience itself, whether or not it is restricted to pure contemplation. The tourist image is quickly replaced by another, and another, and another, and we rarely return to the first.

However, there is another, less frustrating approach: with a little training, it is possible to sharpen the eye to see through the local landscape, to overcome natural barriers, cross borders, enjoy the web of information that covers the sensible world, and thus become a transcendental tourist.

When travelling to a place, the transcendental tourist invokes knowledge and memories - personal, borrowed, ancestral, in short, of any kind that actively contaminates their own experience, without the expectation of a goal to be achieved. It is auspicious to add to a landscape data and experiences pertinent to other peoples and places, building delicate, multidirectional bridges, allowing new mental crossings. In theory, if the view is prospective, this works as if, when contemplating and recording the sea, he/she is more concerned with demonstrating that that blue immensity is the same that touches all the beaches in the world. In the opposite, retrospective way, it would be like looking at a pebble trying to map, on its surface, all the stones scattered around the world born from the same rock. In practice, the camera's focus must be both precise and diffuse, while the writing lays the foundations for a journey whose beginning and end are less important than the middle. However, none of this can be turned into a formula or method: each experience is unique and each one is a new invitation to imagine possibilities, beyond the spectrum of the visible, far beyond the material world.

Rosângela Rennó, 2016/2024