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In 1996, on the other side of Brazil, Rennó responded to another archive, of negatives from the Penitenciário Paulista in São Paulo, with the same sense of fearless inquisitiveness. Following tense negotiations, Rennó was given permission to use some of the no longer relevant prisoner identification photographs from the 1920s to the 1960s. After looking at twenty thousand glass and nitrate negatives, Rennó produced Scar Series, 1996–97. The artist made a selection of strikingly straightforward photographs of prison tattoos and enhanced them, drawing one’s attention to the rawness of the original images. From this vast,
essentially solitary undertaking— a complex analogue to her earlier work in Brasilia—Rennó produced another series of large photographs based on images from Penitenciário Paulista, entitled Série Vulgo (Alias Series, 1998–99), in which the artist marked photographs of the backs of prisoner’s heads with a faint red. For Rennó, this gesture offered “more possibilities than just the violence/ brutality” and “reminds us of the life, of the violence, and of the violence against life of such a place.” Rennó’s continuous refusal to use the archival photograph in its original state compels the viewer to see the past in the present and to
Volcan, from the series Alias, 1998-1999. Digital photos made from reproductions of photographic negatives from the Penitenciary Museum of São Paulo. Cibrachrome print. 65 x 45 1/5 in. (165 x 115 cm.).
re-stage history in the mind’s eye. An evocative example of this approach is Série Vermelha (Militares) (Red Series, 2001–03), which was exhibited at the Venice Biennial. This work comprises sixteen images from a collection of family albums found in different countries, in flea markets, second-hand shops, and the streets. Hovering above eye level, these enlarged and transformed images feature individual men and boys wearing military uniforms that evoke heroic narratives and a romantic sensibility. But these militaristic images are saturated with a dark red, which suppresses specific details and visual information. What remains of each image suggests state and military violence while at the same time being wholly anonymous, as if the subject is about to fade into history, to abandon its brief moment of subjectivity, to cease corporeal representation, and to revert to a conceptual erasure that is nothing less than death: the obscure and the unnameable. Using the gallery to explore forgotten lives, nameless places, and irrecoverable moments, as a form of critical engagement with the world outside its white walls, Rennó chooses not to replicate archival systems but rather to use them as starting points: to choreograph text and image through rigorous imagination, idiosyncratic correspondences, and an intuitive taxonomy of apparitions. An example of this highly developed sensibility is Rennó’s ongoing project Arquivo Universal (Universal Archive, 1992), which features newspaper excerpts in which the journalists refer to particular photographs. Stored in the artist’s computer, this series has been manifested in a myriad of formats such as groups of texts etched on walls or assembled with photographs. Another installation, Bibliotheca (Library, 2002), comprises one hundred photography albums from several sources, sheltered in museum vitrines and unified by color codes; an associated map traces the locations where the albums were