Santo Antônio da Patrulha, 1976. Lives in São Paulo

The expanded possibilities video, photography, machines and installations bring to the image fascinate Letícia Ramos. Her art stands out for numerous aspects: complete mastery of photographic and filmic craft, artisanal creation of image-capture devices, the constructive capacity that runs through her synthetic and holistic production of the artwork, and, last but not least, her own trademark manner of weaving in an ambiguous fictional narrative that becomes camouflaged among the so-called “truths” of science and history. Her training in architecture and cinema, as well as her vast repertoire in science fiction, help determine her poetic universe.

In Grão [Grain] (2016), for example, the artist transports the viewer into a future in which a catastrophe is about to send a human colony set up on another planet into meltdown. A ruptured silo triggers the rampant proliferation of an apparently unstoppable weed. The story is told in a scaled model, conjuring an inhospitable miniature environment intercalated with details of biological phenomena obtained through macrophotography. As in other works, here the artist subverts the logic behind the production of scientific documents and proof in order to create new narratives that evoke some distant past or future. At the Triennial, Ramos uses holography and drawing to represent a meteorite that seems to come from Sorocaba’s remotest history. Like a piece in an archeological or ethnographical museum, this celestial body is a throwback to a past that has returned to disturb our reality and deconstruct the present.

This work dialogues with another project developed especially for Frestas, but not carried through: a large hologram of a meteorite in the hall of the old Sorocaba Railway Station.

[D.M.]

Obras

Meteorito em suspensão, 2017
Desenho, colagem e maquete holográfica

Grão, 2016
16 mm transferido para vídeo, full HD, 8’