1943, Malmö, Sweden. Lives in Skanör, Sweden
Charlotte Johannesson
From analogue images to those generated by programming codes, the work of artist Charlotte Johannesson refers us to the constantly updated interval of this transition. From the loom conceived by the artist in the 1970s emerge “pixelated” images with references to punk culture and style. Her tapestries refer us to various issues such as the feminist cause (stressed by the use of a medium that is traditionally associated with women and in which Johannesson has had formal training), the crisis of representation in parliamentary politics (the work No Choice Amongst Stinking Fish is a commentary on the general elections in Sweden in 1976), the military coup in Chile in 1973 (cited in the work Chile eko i skallen), and the actions of Ulrike Meinhof, terrorist and leader of the German Red Army Faction (honored in the tapestries Achtung – Actions Speak Louder than Words and Frei die RAF). Johannesson's work is influenced by that of Hannah Ryggen, a mid-twentieth century Swedish-Norwegian artist who insisted on weaving as a medium of social satire and an epic format to replace history painting. The Digital Theater, which Charlotte Johannesson founded and ran in collaboration with her partner, Sture Johannesson, between 1981 and 1985, was the first microcomputer graphics studio in Scandinavia and its story remains in the process of recovery. At the Theater she produced a large number of digital graphics, for which she had to teach herself to program, since the computers she worked on – her digital “actors” – came without a graphics program. The profound proximity of her artisanal digitalization and the automatic digitalization of computerized images makes us observe what could be defined as an “interval” space explored by the artist. In other words, something is bound to update itself in these tapestries and prints of designs made on the Apple II Plus computers Johannesson worked on in The Digital Theatre – with the same 239 by 191 “pixels” that the loom possesses. We normally juxtapose analogue and digital images; by establishing the loom and the computer as related machines, Johannesson placed them both in the lineage of the eighteenth-century mechanical Jacquard loom that can be seen as a precursor to the calculator and the computer. Women, by extension, can be seen as the first programmers, and the mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1952) is known as being the first writer of an algorithm to be processed by a machine. The materiality of the tapestry and its way of concentrating and interlacing threads, revealing the strength of its intersections, are articulated in her work. It is also facing the proximity to computer images that the idea of authorship is put at stake. Yet, it is precisely because she does not refuse to put herself at stake, by engaging with the loom, that Johannesson reaffirms the ethical dimension of the social satire in her work. Therefore, subject matter and technique, image and gesture, dissemination and resistance are interlaced in the oeuvre of an artist that is still relatively unknown in her own country. ——Paulo Carvalho
Achtung – Actions Speak Louder than Words [Attention – Actions Speak Louder than Words], 1976. Tapestry. 150 × 100 cm.