Adriana Rocha
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VISÃO TROCADA - EXCHANGING PLACES
(…) Warriors with warriors go zig, zig zag .
(from the song Escravos de Jó in MELO, Veríssimo de (org). Rondas infantis brasileiras. São Paulo: Departamento
de Cultura, 1953).
Five artists Adriana Rocha, Denise Adams, Nino Rezende, Pazé and Sonia Guggisberg set themselves the challenge
of randomly exchanging works to be uses as motifs for new ones. This led to the Visão Trocada exhibition being held
to show the outcome of the experiment.
All the artists were free to choose which works they would give the others, or do work especially for this purpose.
Curiously, we find that all of them used photographs as points of departure, perhaps due to their convenience with
the spread of digital imaging.
Photographer Denise Adams selected studies of photographs of miniatures taken from 1998 to 2003 and Sonia
Guggisberg took them as her theme. Sonia’s photographs of facades of colorful but ordinary houses with lots of
elements showing disorganization and accumulation, such as a garbage bin near a clothes line, were the inspiration
for Pazé. He had contributed photos from one of his projects prior to 2001 in which a dummy resembling him was
placed in strategic spots in São Paulo, in the Old Center, which became the reference for Adriana Rocha's work. The
draw gave Nino Rezende Adriana's photomontage based on landscapes she had photographed on journeys to Sete Povos
das Missões and Lençóis Maranhenses. Three photographs from a set of works on Nino’s everyday life, conceived when
he was living in Berlin from 2000 to 2001, became the proposal for Denise Adams' work.
As part of this process, we might wonder how freedom of choice - in the sense that the artists were free to select
which work they would give the others and what others selected from that work - affected the outcome of the
exhibition.
Various possibilities were open to them - turning away from the proposal they had been given, or - on the contrary-
immersing themselves in it, or again totally transforming it. But one point that emerged very clearly was the
emphasis on the poetics of the other. Some elements of works were used as the basis for "exchanging glances" by the
artists that absorbed them and emphasized certain features depending on their gaze / selection: Denise Adams'
miniatures are seen in Sonia Guggisberg's work, which inverts both the scale of Adams' work and her original
photographic support (using transparent plastic instead of paper). Pazé took the ordinary houses photographed by
Sonia and rebuilt them for the exhibition, almost totally true to the originals, to reinforce the notion of urban
landscape in her photos. An interesting point is that one of the "houses" has a small window with a view onto
Avenida São João, in an allusion to the exhibition's surroundings. Pazé's dummy (a kind of replica of him, let us
recall) was used as painting and photo-print in Adriana Rocha's work, thus emphasizing the notion of self-portrait
from Pazé's work. Nino Rezende multiplied the landscapes photographed by Adriana to compile a photographic travel
log of landscapes and people from places - the south of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Camburi and Berlin - where he has
lived, or is currently living. One of Nino's photographs (taken from the balcony of his house in Berlin) is clearly
shown in Denise Adams' video based on the idea of cycle (freezing and thawing).
This movement based on the glance and its perception of the other comprises the identity of the exhibition, based
on individual proposals but not characterized as such since it is created by a fusion of poetics.
Daniela Maura Ribeiro