There are poetics of space and poetic spaces - and this does not necessarily have to do with the compositional skills of any architect. There are also places of affection and affection for places - and nor does this always refer to some unmistakable beauty of the form of the spaces. The thing is that, in the case of spatiality, affections and poetics derive from experiences and from constitution modes, respectively. In this respect, the morphology is less important than are the ways in which spaces are woven and dressed.
Without having to theorize about this, Janaina Mello Landini weaves and dresses the space as one makes and unbraids a rope. Or better put, as one who dismantles a rope which disperses and sticks to the walls. It sticks, since it is string, by tying itself to nails. Many nails, many lines. For each line, one nail; and one single rope entangling the starting points of the vectors that traverse the distances between the walls.
In face of this unbraided, unwoven, ciclotrama of Janaina, it is natural to think of the nature of the roots of plants, of the circulatory systems of bodies, the nerve endings of neurons, of the electrical beams of rays and so on. And, for those to whom the natural is the realm of ideas, it is easy to go from there to the rhizomatic theories of post-structuralist philosophy.
But lets us slow down on the metaphors which are suggested to us by isomorphisms, to think more deeply about what is being unwoven. The subsequent actions of the artist promote a peculiar relationship between an object and its position in space as an integral and constituent part of it. Let us see. If there is a rope on the living room floor, even if the rope is thick and long, the difference in scale between the room and the rope allows for identifying between them a relationship between container and content, edge and object. But as the rope is dismantled, spreads its ramifications all over the ground, it - although thinner – is transformed from something that is "contained by" into something that constitutes the space. The rope, by occupying the air in its branchings, thin and fragile, is able to alter the perception of the room. Before noticing the walls, even before realizing that there are walls, the ciclotramas stand transparent and as a limit. Indeed, it is not possible to enter it, because they make the space while occupying it, voraciously.
Thus the poetics of this space can only be that of the full field, which is confused with its own visibility, in this case the visibility resulting from the densification of lines connecting its walls. On the one hand, there is no room for the visitor, who is excluded from the relationship in which container and content are equivalent in scale and presence. On the other, persistent observation can see through the maze, reaching architectural details and can lose itself, confusing depths.
It is and is it not a vortex. In practice it is not, because the lines do not seep into the rope, but expand from it, successively dividing itself in geometric progression. But it also is vortex, as a perception, because the perspective is engulfed by the network of wires. One then may wish to ask: Is this is about pure experimentation on the sculptural properties and possibilities of a material, the rope? Or would this be some sort of empirical treatise in the nature of perception of spaces? Or a metaphor for some implicit narrative?
Exclusive answers do not seem to fit well with regard to art, but I get the impression that the exercise of the artist reflects, first and foremost, the disorienting effects arising from the transcription to concrete reality of something that, as a mathematical model, is very simple. At each junction the line doubles - 2, 4, 8, 16 ... - and at the same time divides its thickness in half - 1, ½, ¼ ... Ultimately, there would be zero, endless lines of zero thickness. But zero is a thing of mathematical abstraction. In practice, the theory is different. Instead of referring to the minimum, which the cyclorama narrates is an entrancing and winding whole, which occupies the space and the senses of those who observe.
Paulo Miyada
