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Portuguese to English: Fragment from photography journal General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Photography/Imaging (& Graphic Arts)
Source text - Portuguese O TRABALHO DE ANA VITÓRIA MUSSI despontou nos anos 1970, década em que a arte brasileira rompeu com os suportes tradicionais, e os artistas se lançaram às novas mídias. Fotografia, cinema e vídeo passaram a concentrar a produção experimental, a reboque das vias abertas pela arte pop e pela arte conceitual. As novas perspectivas poéticas oferecidas aos artistas pelos aparatos técnicos expandiam as formas de representação e promoviam a crítica ao sistema oficial da arte e a suas práticas seculares.
Mussi emerge como artista ao mesmo tempo que a fotografia se sedimenta como meio e a autonomia da linguagem fotográfica entra em debate. Tentando furar as convenções, avançar limites técnicos e elaborar uma linguagem própria, a artista explorou a fotografia em intervenções que deslocavam a realidade para um campo móvel, inesperado ou absurdo. A importância de sua obra reside no pioneirismo e no interesse constante e duradouro pelo meio fotográfico como expressão estética e como forma de pensamento.
A photojournalist, Mussi has always remained active as an artist. Her interest in sports as a theme has been with her since the beginning of her career. The photographs of sportsmen and women in newspapers awakened her to the possibility of manipulating their bodies in action and movement, breaking the narrative and the integrity of the image. She also considers sport as a synthesis of the human drama, the challenges, the conflicts, the conquests and the failures of existence. Mussi touches upon both the plasticity and instability of the action in the representation itself and the dramatic incidents in life.
In Barreiras (1972), Mussi removes some areas of the images by covering them with black ink and photographs them again. The black-and-white photos that result emerge from an already transformed and unreal referent. What we see, therefore, are disappearances, records of what is not there, traces, shadows that exacerbate the dramatic tone of the image, in a conscious process of disfiguration. The contrasts in the light, the break from verisimilitude, and disorientation question the mechanical and documentary origin of photography. It is, therefore, the document that doubles with the imaginary, the real re-figured as fantasy, the metamorphosis of the objects and bodies into pure images.
The deconstruction of the photograph as a document, which has been challenged by theorists since the beginning of the 20th century, is the basis of the artist's work. Mussi's search for intermediate spaces between the real and the unreal, through simple but decisive gestures, is an attempt to circumvent the camera's ability and the sovereignty of technique, imparting a ghostly character to the image, with floating spaces where previously there were only stable events and certainties.
Photography’s reduction of time to an isolated instant, flattening the depth and blocking peripheral vision, had already led Roland Barthes to consider photographic entities as "paper beings," a subject he believed fed fiction. Mussi’s beings match this description because they have no reality and are just that - photographs. But the theater of light and shadows and the contrast between the stark white and deep black of her images - which reminds us of Oswaldo Goeldi's engravings - preserve a powerful and vibrant dynamic, which attempts to overcome the immobility and morbidity of the photographic media, immersing the spectator in a dramatic atmosphere that is the engine that recovers the vivacity of the areas Mussi removed and reintegrates the scene, which is reduced to fragments in a world of light.
Translation - English THE WORK OF ANA VITÓRIA MUSSI emerged in the 1970s, a decade in which Brazilian art broke with traditional forms and artists launched into the new media. Photography, film, and video started concentrating on experimental production, in the wake of pop art and conceptual art. The different poetic perspectives offered to artists by new technologies expanded the forms of representation open to them and promoted criticism of the official art system and its practices over the centuries.
Mussi emerged as an artist at the same time as photography became a mainstream artistic medium and the autonomy of the photographic language became open to debate. Attempting to break with convention, advance the technical limits, and elaborate a language of her own, she explores photography in interventions that shift reality to a moving, unexpected, or absurd field. The importance of her work lies in both her pioneering approach and her constant and lasting interest in photography as a medium of aesthetic expression and as a form of thought.
A photojournalist, Mussi has always remained active as an artist. Her interest in sports as a theme has been with her since the beginning of her career. The photographs of sportsmen and women in newspapers awakened her to the possibility of manipulating their bodies in action and movement, breaking the narrative and the integrity of the image. She also considers sport as a synthesis of the human drama, the challenges, the conflicts, the conquests and the failures of existence. Mussi touches upon both the plasticity and instability of the action in the representation itself and the dramatic incidents in life.
In Barreiras (1972), Mussi removes some areas of the images by covering them with black ink and photographs them again. The black-and-white photos that result emerge from an already transformed and unreal referent. What we see, therefore, are disappearances, records of what is not there, traces, shadows that exacerbate the dramatic tone of the image, in a conscious process of disfiguration. The contrasts in the light, the break from verisimilitude, and disorientation question the mechanical and documentary origin of photography. It is, therefore, the document that doubles with the imaginary, the real re-figured as fantasy, the metamorphosis of the objects and bodies into pure images.
The deconstruction of the photograph as a document, which has been challenged by theorists since the beginning of the 20th century, is the basis of the artist's work. Mussi's search for intermediate spaces between the real and the unreal, through simple but decisive gestures, is an attempt to circumvent the camera's ability and the sovereignty of technique, imparting a ghostly character to the image, with floating spaces where previously there were only stable events and certainties.
Photography’s reduction of time to an isolated instant, flattening the depth and blocking peripheral vision, had already led Roland Barthes to consider photographic entities as "paper beings," a subject he believed fed fiction. Mussi’s beings match this description because they have no reality and are just that - photographs. But the theater of light and shadows and the contrast between the stark white and deep black of her images - which reminds us of Oswaldo Goeldi's engravings - preserve a powerful and vibrant dynamic, which attempts to overcome the immobility and morbidity of the photographic media, immersing the spectator in a dramatic atmosphere that is the engine that recovers the vivacity of the areas Mussi removed and reintegrates the scene, which is reduced to fragments in a world of light.
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Years of experience: 13. Registered at ProZ.com: Oct 2017.
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