Quebrar o silêncio
e depois recolher
os pedaços
testar-lhes o corte
o brilho
cego

Ana Martins Marques
(The Book of Similarities, 2015, p. 51)

 

Between 1979 and 1989, Ana Vitória Mussi was a photographer for the society column of Rio de Janeiro newspapers. She covered countless events attended by heads of state, celebrities, and members of Rio’s elite. “Society” was the term used to designate people worthy of column coverage, or high society, making use of foreign terms, among other devices convenient to cultural imperialism, to convey distinction.

During the so-called “lost decade,” while Brazil was undergoing the transition from dictatorship to democracy, the economy was in the throes of a severe crisis marked by hyperinflation. During this period, this type of commercial photography became a means of subsistence for the artist. The routine of field assignments, newsrooms, and analog darkrooms, however, generated archives that continued to fuel her entire subsequent career and whose themes can be said to have been present in her research from the very beginning. Bringing together some 20 works created between 1970 and 2011, this solo exhibition confirms the artist’s persistence in exploring the relationships between technical images, narratives of power, and critical strategies.

Ana Vitória Mussi (Laguna, SC, 1943) was a student of Ivan Serpa in the drawing and painting courses at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 1970s. At that time, the institution served as a meeting point for the city’s experimental avant-garde. There, the artist witnessed the emergence of Brazilian video art and began creating in multimedia formats, including photography and interventions in media content and circuits.

As early as 1970, Ana Vitória appropriated pages from daily newspapers to develop works such as “Morto anônimo” and “Mobilização”. Like Antonio Manuel and Yolanda Freyre, who also adopted this practice around the same time, the artist often drew or painted using print media as a support. The interplay arising from the relationship between the original graphic image and the forms superimposed upon it—sometimes opaque, sometimes translucent—encapsulates the metaphor of art’s presence in daily life, with the ambition to transform sociopolitical reality. Crossing out and supposedly “editing” the news was a way to cast doubt on the sanitized narratives that were typically disseminated during times of harsh repression and control.

Even before working within a media outlet, Ana Vitória turned her projects into opportunities to claim agency—as an artist and, above all, a citizen—over the imagery of the media and the cultural industry. In “Box na TV” (1975), she photographed nine moments of a fight broadcast on television. Organized in a non-linear manner, the polyptych runs counter to a visual synthesis and leaves no certainty regarding winners and losers. The duel transcends the depicted theme to problematize the very dynamics of the mass production and circulation of images. By disrupting the hegemony of the gaze, the work demonstrates that every construction of public narratives is traversed by irreducible paths, ambivalences, and disagreements.

When she left the press, Ana Vitória had accumulated hundreds of rolls of film from the photographs she had taken. There were slides, conventional negatives, and those that particularly caught her attention—from the Kodalite brand, with their characteristic transparent acetate. This vast material came to be used in the artist’s research. Sifting through them and employing them in her work remains, to this day, her way of scrutinizing her past and, above all, the premises of maintaining norms and roles perpetuated by images. In doing so, she aligned herself with a strand of contemporary photography that—since the 1980s, following the example of figures such as Rosângela Rennó and Christian Boltanski—embraced collections and hybridizations with other languages as expressive media.

In series such as “Encobrimento” (1978) and “Resíduos” (1992), Ana Vitória subjected frames from old films to layers of silkscreen, paint, and engraving. Her aim was to introduce discursive changes into the original images, as well as to literally smother the signs of power and propaganda that had been present in them until then. Namely, “Recortes do ano” (1994) is entirely constructed from portraits of famous people, whose identities are blurred by the artist, returning them to anonymity.

However, just as much as the glazes, attentive and analytical observation is also part of the artist’s range of operations. Works such as Mergulho na imagem (2009) and Pausa, from the Andamento series (2011), take on the form of an object to lift the images off the plane, literally giving them thickness and, thus, attempting to unravel their mechanisms of belief. Like the optical instruments dating back to the dawn of photography in the 19th century, these are structures based on simple gestures, yet endowed with a highly effective didactic quality.

As life becomes inundated with digital images and creations of artificial intelligence, further accelerating the pace of circulation and clouding our judgment in equal measure, Ana Vitória Mussi invites us to revisit an unresolved issue from the 20th century. This chronicler of the “imagosphere”—the public sphere mediated by images—continues to pore over shards that still glimmer, even as they bear witness to failures and anachronisms. Through her, we learn that perhaps it is not the images themselves that are in crisis, but rather the society of images with its practices of numbing the gaze—not to mention the other senses. 

Ana Maria Maia