By Matias Monteiro
Janaína Miranda seems to sense complicity between the precarious balance of the phenomena she calls landscape and the instability of the photographic record. The gap between the continuous stream of events (diachrony) that the photography suggests only establishes it in the contiguous system of images (heterochrony). Thus, in the artist's photographic series, the display strategies (margins, positioning, dimensions) produce an internal system as significant as the images. And here, perhaps, lies one of the most instigating qualities of her production: her photographs are not merely landscape records. They are, in their mise-en-scène, landscapes.
We must, therefore, conclude that the landscape we are referring to will never be understood as a natural emergence from the world but rather as a semantic value or a set of cultural statements. Janaína's landscapes are essentially denatured, and her work is organized according to a formal structure: her photographs are predominantly orthogonal, with a predilection for frontal perspective (from one point), a quality reinforced by the grid layout. Her landscapes are rarely oblique or diagonal; her images do not result from glimpses, glances, peeks, or peripheral perspectives. Instead, they confront the subject, claiming their gaze as an inescapable apparition, and yet, even under this direct and frontal register, something in them resists and remains partially unintelligible (a dimension emphasized by their lacunar montages, in which there are always projections of potential absent photographs).
The landscape besieges us as an unfathomable phenomenon, not because of some transcendental mystery but because of its essentially imagistic power. Renata Azambuja points out this quality in the artist's proposals, alluding to an averse or abyss that appears in her images as the action of an unnamable (perhaps the equivalent, in the register of the enunciation, of that scopic dimension that Karina Dias refers to as invisão).
In Janaína's work, there is a recurring allusion to events that took place out of frame, the effects of which we can only access as traces or remnants. In Landscape of waiting, the immobile and concealed vehicle becomes a kind of involuntary monument (focused, according to the artist, on the desire for invisibility and resistance to the environment); in the series Othering, the apparent vegetal immobility is subverted by the discovery of tropism and, in Chimerical Abode, the damp obsolescence of a clearing is the result of the falling of a tree… Thus, the artist works with the notion of chronological tropes (“a place has become a time”), and the photographer's craft is revealed to be analogous to the archaeologist's.
In Proposal for landscape invention [2015], the photographic medium gives way to tickets printed on thermosensitive paper, collected using a set of guidelines and arranged under a subjective system of associations:
1- Go to the nearest racecourse.
2- Bet on all the horses named after elements that refer to the landscape.
3- Keep the tickets.
4- Build Invent your landscape.
The obliteration denounces the ambivalence of the process: the arbitrariness of the selection of names and the organization of the material obtained intends a formal (constructive) system in the fabrication or fiction (invention) process. The photosensitive medium (and therefore subjected to obliteration) is the trace of a gesture; its very evidentiary dimension (documental value) is subverted by its fictional quality (the bets are simultaneously attributed to different cities). The result is an archive in a landscape: halfway between constellations that allude to a certain Mallarmé quality and the ratification of a Muybridge-like sequential quality.
Landscapes, like photography, are elaborated (constructed) and forged (invented), engendered in the imprecise quality between these registers. Thus, Janaína emphasizes this confluence through a system supposedly distant from the traditional pillars of photography, only to unveil it as photographic.
Designation causes torment; the set of receipts constitutes the evidence of an action (going to the racecourse), systematized by a method (selection of horses by association and analogy) in a display (which receives the same treatment as its photographs); orthogonal, lacunar, framed…). Therefore, it turns out to be a cartographic exercise: Easter Island remains isolated, as does Atlas (supporting a firmament composed of stellar and celestial allusions) … there is also room for references to artists (as in the case of the intriguing competitor named Jenny Holzer or the convenient approximation of Desert dream and El Huracan, an allusion to the work Tornado, Milpa Alta by Francis Alÿs). These naming incidents, aligned by semantic affinities, combine with the very obsolescence of this game (the horse arena, the jockey club, and the betting on horses seem to belong to an archaic gambling dimension), producing a bond and unveiling the poetic qualities of the inventory.
We are suddenly referred to the famous Aithon, a horse whose rider varied immensely in Greek mythological tradition; sometimes the black steed of Hades, sometimes the mount of Pallas, sometimes the riding of Helios… in any case, its quality was expressed by its name (shining, brilliant, resplendent). The equine, converted into a beam of sunlight, darkness, or epiphany, produces landscapes through the associations suggested.
Competition became a constellation; words gravitate around provisional meanings. This is a topography I want to explore…
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Matias Monteiro works as an artist, curator, and doctoral professor and is involved in educational programs in museums and cultural centers.
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