Document-matter and sensory effect in Renata Pinheiro’s contemporary art and cinema

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between cinema and contemporary arts focusing on Renata Pinheiro’s work as a visual artist, a production designer and a director. The focus is on how aesthetic and discursive procedures arising from the use of spaces and objects marked by time creates an affective and sensory dimension that evokes other temporalities and alterities, adding material aspects of memory to the process of shaping the work. For a better approximation to the theme and formulation of the operative concepts, other contemporary artistic manifestations in works by visual artists such as Rosângela Rennó, Richard Serra and Simryn Gill and in a theatrical production by the group Teatro da Vertigem were also accounted. Renata Pinheiro’s works use resonance of matter as an aesthetic potential, which produces a displacement of meanings previously generated in the dynamics of object’s insertion and use in other social relations, prior to its appropriation by the work. This evocative capacity is what is here called document matter. Added to this are the immersive properties generated by the reconfiguration of the experience with space, an attribute of the installation work, which allows the observer to build his experience in the sensory inter-relation between body, work, and context.