Renata Padovan, Fleeting Traces

In their minds, maps have transcended the cartographic representation, becoming the traces of imagined landscapes, the routes drawn by a familiar sound, or even the emotional spaces erected by the smell of wet earth in summer. In the same way, a border may be both the barrier which is impossible to cross and a productive inner state in which the feeling of not belonging and the rich ambivalence of being multiple coexist, and in which freedom reigns sovereign.

The work that Renata Padovan has been developing over the past fifteen years might be summarized as the research associated to two fundamental conceptual axes: the border as limit and line in drawing, and the exercise of mapping. Her multimedia creations are proposals of visual mapping in which spatial poetics and politics are resignified on the basis of multisensory experiences.

While her working methods include actions which might be associated with the field of performance, they are not aimed at an audience, that is, at an intended recipient, but quite on the contrary they are carried out in the solitude of remote landscapes, as was previously the case of artist Ana Mendieta, and also of the perpetual walker, Richard Long. For this reason, should we need to associate her practice to art history movements, it would be precisely the path traced by the aesthetic-conceptual premises of Land Art that Padovan’s work would tread.

In 2002, Padovan presented at the Chelsea College of Art and Design MA Show in London the installation Marambaia (**) which consisted of drawings made with grass seeds on her studio floor. The organic design gradually changed on a daily basis following the vital impulse of the seeds which, sprouting and exploding into green shoots with the passing days, would give rise to lines of grass on the carpet, creating circuits and weaves in constant mutation. This work lent continuity to a research already initiated in Brazil in the 1990s with the piece Desenho no Picadeiro , created for the Museu do Açude in Rio de Janeiro (1997), in which the lines drawn with tar on the pavement covered an overall area of 800 square meters in the surroundings of the building. Along the same line of research was the work Adagio (1999), also executed in grass for the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture. All these works by Renata Padovan are anchored in an inquiry into the physical possibilities of organic materials which pervades her entire body of work, being present in sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs and sound compositions. In these artistic interventions in the landscape as well as in galleries and museums, the action of time on the natural elements determines the end result.

In the work Over the Fence (2008), the artist reproduced the principle of the line or trace in the minimalist landscape of the Norwegian winter. On the snow-covered immensity, her mark − which was red on this occasion − evoked through persisting documentation the blood traces left by the whales and seals systematically depredated by Norwegian and Japanese fishing fleets.

Observing these relational processes which involve corporeality and landscape, we might perhaps invert the notion of psychogeography posited by Débord and the situationists: his premise on the specific effect of the geographical environment on the emotions of individuals is transformed into a psychic and emotional imprint on the space through the mark left on the landscape.

Taking as her point of departure a similar principle of inversion, Renata Padovan defines her incursion into sound as the opposite of the creative process of other artists, referring fundamentally to the methodology of John Cage, who arrived at the visual via the aural, whereas she describes herself as treading the same path from the opposite direction: from the visual to sound. Her first work with sound was performed at The Banff Centre, when she was invited to participate in the residencies program in 1996 and began to transpose to musical notation a series of drawings made in the studio. The drawings, cross sections of Canada’s mountainous areas, became the score of a composition for violoncello in which the lines functioned as music scores.

Following her investigation of sound as trace, Cantos (2004-2011), whose sculptural component consists of a wooden sphere which fits into a person’s cupped hands, contains a secret sound core which, amplified by an interior speaker system, evokes the powerful trace of primary memories. In this case, the sound is a recording of the voices of people who came as immigrants to Brazil, bringing with them their native cartography recalled in lullabies. The ‘spectator’ viewing this work is invited to hold this sphere in his/her hands and with the help of a set of headphones, listen to the songs recorded in multiple languages; in Hungarian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Lebanese, Argentine Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, French, Galician, English, Hebrew and Ladino, the voices construct an ethnic and historical polyphony of Brazil.

Renata Padovan’s latest work, still in progress, contains a video which has already been completed and a sound proposal to be developed in an upcoming residence in Ljubljana, both components based on the course of the Xingu River in the State of Pará. A escala do desastre (2012) records in video the ecological catastrophe produced by massive deforestation and the forced deviation of the river from its course for the construction of the controversial Belo Monte Dam. This almost documentary recording touches a raw nerve in the Brazilian public opinion. In the ten-minute video we participate in a boat tour of the magnificent river and end up discovering the magnitude of the deforestation in full process. In this work which might be read as testimonial, the artist’s main interest is focused on the physical scale of the socio-ecological disaster and the repercussions of the project on the environment in the name of a dubious progress (it is a known fact that the hydroelectric power plant will only achieve a forty-percent productivity, since the river is subject to long periods of drought annually). The work evokes the travels of the Age of Discovery, when the skilled 17th-century draftsmen vainly attempted to represent the grandeur of a landscape which was as incommensurable as it was incomprehensible for the European conscience: interpretation as a problem of scale. A landscape whose power is sovereign and at the same time exclusive becomes the tragic stage in which a considerable number of indigenous peoples and riverside peasants struggle for survival in the face of the growing threat of the construction of mega engineering projects and the mining exploitation they are linked to. The voice of the Asurini Community, in the Kuatinemu village − the raw material of the sound project under construction − is introduced at the end of the video as a spectral presence in search of its space: the fleeting sound trace of resistance.

About Renata Padovan

Renata Padovan is a Brazilian artist living and working in São Paulo. She graduated with a BA degree in Social Communications from the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) São Paulo, later followed by an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, 2001. She has participated in several residencies programs in Slovenia, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Japan and the UK.

Her work has been widely exhibited both in Brazil and abroad in galleries, museums and festivals. Solo shows include Baró Galeria, Galeria Thomas Cohn, Galeria Eduardo Fernandes, São Paulo Cultural Center, and Museu do Açude, Paço Imperial and Espaço Cultural dos Correios in Rio de Janeiro.

Group shows include: “Vaivém”, Sesc Pinheiros, São Paulo, 2013; “Traffic Jam”, Taipei, Taiwan; “Imagem Contato”, Sesc, São Paulo, 2012; “Radio Arts Space”, Parobrod Cultural Center, Ljubljana; “Album: contemporary photograpy”, Baró Galeria, São Paulo; “Time flies when we have fun” – Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2011; “Wonderland, actions and paradoxes”, São Paulo Cultural Center, 2010; and “Unframed world”, MAC São Paulo, 2009.

* Independent curator based in London

**Term of Tupi Guaraní origin, it refers to a sand bar or a stone strip by a water course, a bank with characteristic vegetation