Letícia Ramos: everything seems very impossible

This cinematic experiment recreates the formula found in Immanuel Kant's book, Writings on the Lisbon Earthquake, in which he describes the chemical process for simulating an earthquake: "It is not difficult for an investigator of Nature to simulate these phenomena. Let us take twenty-five pounds of iron filings, and another twenty pounds of sulphur, and mix them with ordinary water. We then bury the mixture a foot or a foot and a half deep and tamp the earth over it. After a few hours, thick smoke will appear, the earth will tremble, and flames will burst out from the ground".

Using a 35mm cinematographic pinhole camera with 24 perforations —built by the artist— the project ERBF captures unusual panoramic images of the city of São Paulo, having as main target the cell phone towers. This process results in 5 one minute films portraying the “city of towers.”

Around 1827, Hercule Florence wrote “Viagem Fluvial do Tietê ao Amazonas“ in his logbook, describing a region of abrupt rock formations near São Geronimo Mountain. During a hazardous trip climbing up and down waterfalls, Hercule took a moment to observe and draw the amazing landscape. It was probably the most magical moment in his journey. The film The Blue Night reconstructs the movement of stars, clouds, and shadows behind those emblematic Chapada Diamantina stones. Influenced by “tableaux transparent“ and stereo pictures, the film recreates an imaginary night lost in time and space.

The film tells the story of a human colony on an unknown planet where an old cereal silo was built. Natural phenomena and changes in the weather cause the silo to break, and a strange plantation grows. The film won the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation "Videoart Award". The artist developed mockups and manipulated microscopic file images to complete the project in an open studio in PIVÔ - Art and Research in São Paulo, Brazil.

The film loop Future of the Past is part of Leticia Ramos’ Black Desert project, in which she continues her research into the creation of analogue fictions that are totally scientific in appearance. This operation, in which the unreal becomes plausible, allows the artist to question the construction of history and our relationship with perception and memory. By exploring a landscape that is evocatively otherworldly and, at the same time, very limited in its potential to harbour human life (volcanic territories, icy plateaus, etc.), Ramos —in the manner of a marvellous adventure— brings us closer not so much to the unknown, but to how we face it.