A rope 20 meters long, 30 centimetres in diameter and weighing 120 kg is suspended in the main hall of the Zipper Gallery. Both ends gradually become dismembered from the main web until their minute thicknesses cling to the walls of the exhibition space, supporting the installation. Remitting to the Cartesian axes, three lines drawn across the wall of the gallery insert the work within the planes of the mapped space and in the terrain of control. Thus, the artist Janaina Mello Landini projects her third solo show at Zipper, open from March 9. Curated by Taisa Palhares, the exhibition Aqui, agora. [Right here, right now.] presents site-specific and canvas works from the Ciclotrama series.
Ciclotrama is a neologism by the artist to designate the research that she has been developing since 2010. From a spatial drawing, she experiments with the physical tension between threads and the distribution of weights in order to deal with subjects like interconnectivity and interdependence. The passage and fixation of time also interest Janaina, who seeks to impregnate the work with the long hours dedicated to the acts of weaving and dismembering, thus establishing a relation with artisanal practice. As the artist states: "Conceptually, a Ciclotrama is the sectioning of a continuous and binary cycle, a schematic structure with a hierarchical characteristic, composed of interdependent parts. As an act, it is the long action of dividing the whole and its parts, until its minimal unit becomes apparent and sustains the whole system as a whole."
Janaina's production flows between different scales - from the public space to objects. The upper storey of the gallery was reserved for the artist's works on canvas. For these, Janaina took as a starting point the imaginary lines (parallel and meridian) of planispheric, cylindrical and conical cartographic projections. Disregarding the territories that originally occupied the representations, the artist creates occupations in this imagined space with ropes that are attached to the canvases and unravel throughout the exhibition space. The artist says, "Ciclotrama is an unpredictable and intuitive act. As a metaphor, it represents flux and ends up determining a zone. The idea in this series of works is to create islands and regions through the relationship between the rope and the cartographic space."
Aqui, agora. runs until April 6.
About the curator
Taisa Palhares is Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy of the State University of Campinas (IFCH/Unicamp). She holds a bachelor's degree (1997), a master's degree (2001) and a PhD in Philosophy (2011) from the University of São Paulo (USP). She carries out studies in the areas of aesthetics and visual arts, with emphasis on research focused on the grounding of the work of art since Modernity. From 2003 to 2015, worked as researcher and curator at the Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo, responsible for the retrospective show Mira Schendel (2013/2014), in partnership with Tate Modern. She is the author of the book Aura: the crisis of art in Walter Benjamin (Fapesp/Barracuda, 2006). Since 2000, she has acted as an art critic, and was one of the creators and co-publishers of the independent journal of art and criticism Número (2003-2010).
