THE CURATOR CARLOS EDUARDO BITU CASSUNDÉ, AFTER 18 MONTHS OF ONLINE MEETINGS WITH RENATA DURING THE TIME OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, COMPLETED THIS FOLLOW-UP PROCESS WITH THE ARTIST THROUGH AN INTERVIEW, CARRIED OUT IN APRIL 2022. THE VIRTUAL DIALOGUES WERE ALSO SHARED WITH THE CURATOR MARCIO HARUM, WITH WHOM THEY DISCUSSED ABOUT ART AND PELEGRINI'S ARTISTIC PRODUCTION.
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01 To start this conversation, I would like you to reflect on some axes and approaches that run through your production and research: indexes that make up your poetics since your initial works and are reinvented through a circular nature. In this context, I also bring your interests in language, calligraphic gestures and oriental art. However, there is a powerful fact within these constructions, which is that of an ancestral nature, which, like a kaleidoscope, activates different aspects of memory. How do all these questions and interests come together in this first place of production?
Your note about the circular nature of the work is one of the increasingly evident indices in my artistic process. Materials and sensations, images and poetry, stories and desires intertwine the visible and the non-visible through relationships where my different expressions move. Some research connects through the unfolding of my ways of doing. Others times it is united by the common instruments that provoked the quest. Relationships are crossing temporalities at the heart of my work. They circulate, reconnect or dissolve, creating the dynamics that we perceive and the indexes that follow each other. Gesture is one of these indexes that exists as a way of proceeding. From language to the body, it is a practice of approximations.
As a teacher I worked with words and extensive libraries, observing the gesture of graphic communication up close was the opportunity that connected me to historical handwritten calligraphy. During a break, in the 90s, I lived in New York, in the USA, and learned Western medieval alphabets: the rigidity of the lines, the marking of spaces, lines of rigor using the pen and ink. At another time, in mid-2000s, I lived in Milan, Italy, and studied eastern calligraphy. In this training, I started using the brush, a mediator in exercising the body to express movement in connection with the energy of the cosmos. This is where my interest in expressive painting stems from and made me learn from other artists in Lugano, Switzerland.
Through the archeology of memory, hands that wrote, women who weaved, put a magnifying glass on manuality and made my expression in art be noticed through the tactile and gestural presence on the canvases, during my graduation in Fine Arts, completed in 2010, already back at Brazil. The organic expression, established in painting by the more liquid and soft calligraphic gestures of Eastern art, was amalgamated with traces of the strength training of the Western calligraphy pen, and added new paths. This was what happened with the colors, which little by little coexisted with the ink and created a new presence.
I name this plural construction as a milieu of relationships: an environment that interests me to discuss new ways of inhabiting this world. And for this reason, investigating through ties is the foundation for grouping complexities and cohabiting times that take place around me. It was in the gesture of the hands that I found a line - sometimes metaphorical, other times, made of wool, chalk, coal, black oil or embedded in metal - certainly a poetic line, which can access the universe that is in the ancestor. The line is (re)connection.
Ancestry brings me closer to nature and memories, and activates the action of caring for a flow. In the making, this question presents itself as an amalgam, approximation and trace. And so, when I express myself in two dimensions, these indices are in the spaces left incomplete, in the images of doors and windows, or in the unstable terrains – markers suggesting both the continuation and the transposition to another place to be discovered. In the three-dimensional, my expression encounters the ambiguous morphology of fabled objects. In the overhead-projector space, the expression is in light and shadow, as complementary binomials.
The exercise of searching for links has been part of my research since 1995 and the emergence and submergence of approaches and expressions is the result of this action. Looking back at this body of work, I can say that this is its flow. Investigations, materials and languages unfold, producing permeability between times and research. And in the process, the primordial vectors of ancestry and circularity point to traces and references that are in the internal body of the work or that echo contemporary thinkers that stimulate my poetic demands. Astrida Neimanis (1) and Ailton Krenak (2) discuss, in different places, issues that are present in the contexts in which I am interested, such as the feminine, which articulates the third vector in my investigation.
From this feminine threshold I rescue instruments for my experiments. Taking care of others, of the surroundings and of the immaterial was what I learned from women. Feeding me with stories about the cycles of the seasons, the waters, feminine bonds, traditions and songs was my Portuguese grandmother, born in "an aldeia", that is, 'a village' (3) and for whom being and acting was a flow; a construction of an impalpable environment, and yet, always expandable.
The word "aldeia" or 'village' is a great reference point for the language, which would seduce me as an academic study line in my degrees in Literature, in Education and in Translation-Interpreting . And it was from the etymology of this word, woven from the Arabic 'aldeamento', the Galician 'aldea' and the Mirandese 'aldé', that the meaning of the genealogical root (re)encountered in the Iberian part of Spain, which is also nature in me, made sense. "Aldeia" or 'Village' is in fact the word that unites desire, memory and root (4).
One of the most powerful series, on which I still work today, was born from these initial intertwining and nodes founding the ancestral world and coexistence. It is the RADIX series that appears and reappears in circular expressions in my process.
NOTES
(1) Astrida Neimanis, on the flow of water in our body and in the oceans, professor at the University of Sydney and author of the book Bodies of Water, a fragment of which is in https://www.academia.edu/28107193/Bodies_of_Water_Posthuman_Feminist_Phenomenology_link_to_Open_Access_HTML_
(2) Ailton Krenak, about the future ancestor, whose narrative begins with the grandmother of the people of Rio Negro. Watch the video on Youtube, series Flecha Selvagem (2021), Episode 1: the snake and the canoe.
(3) "Aldeia" _ Village _ a word that my grandmother used to designate her place of origin in Portugal close to the border with Spain, where Mirandês is spoken; a small village.
(4) Root also became important when I thought about the flow of knowledge that existed in the land before it was Brazil. At the University of São Paulo, I studied Tupi-Guarani to get closer to this desire to understand myself as nature and make the movement towards the origin.
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