Otherworld full of worlds |Rafaela Lima
09 - 31.05.2024

Otherworld full of worlds immediately suggests to each observer-subject a multiplicity of worlds coalescing within the work of art. However, we must step quite far back to grasp the full spectrum of these worlds contained in Rafaela Lima’s work, as she reactivates a problem that dates back to the beginning of modernity and to the resulting epistemological shift in vision.

The camera obscura simultaneously served as both model and metaphor to describe the relationship between observer and reality for centuries, in which observation enabled one to extract conclusions from the world that were considered valid and true. The body and its subjectivity (that produced through empirical experience), however, were absent from the equation. With Goethe, and through his experiments toward a theory of colors, “the body, with its contingencies and specificities, became the active producer of optical experience,”[1] according to Jonathan Crary. Beyond the physiological and anatomical conditions of each subject, the very processes tied to the subjectivity of observational experience—both requiring temporal unfolding—interfere with and shape perception and cognition. Rather than an ordered continuity of stable sensations—as Locke or Condillac proposed—observation entails a play and interaction of forces among different relationships, both spatial and temporal, dependent, as Maine de Biran suggested, on an amalgamation of past and present. Or, as the physicist André-Marie Ampère defined it: any perception is grounded in a prior or remembered perception.

This brief detour through the rupture in modernity regarding observation is essential for understanding the artist’s various approaches to this experience. Her work begins precisely from a perception that the artist herself never experienced: the observation of the Earth’s surface from the altitude reached during an विमान journey. The absence of this perception—and of the knowledge it would generate in the body—leads the artist to activate imagination and, more importantly, to fabricate the temporal unfolding that such experience requires. She ultimately confuses two systems—perception and cognition—through a third: that of aesthetic experience (as is evident in the work Exercício de voo no. 1, 2023, in which, interestingly, the airplane model was shaped from that “virtual past,” as Bergson defines it, which accumulates unrealized images, materializing into a sculpture that can be said to represent a common airplane or all airplanes in the world). This is a major challenge that the artist overcomes by working systematically across different scales and orders—from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the plausible to the abstract—because it is fundamentally about our relationship with the world and the universe, which we continue to measure, regardless of optical instruments, through our own bodies.

According to Jonathan Crary, the changes introduced by the invention of certain optical devices are primarily consequences of transformations in the subject following the discovery of subjective vision and the abandonment of the static camera obscura model (its connection to photography being merely a romantic illusion perpetuated by some theorists and reinforced by the mistaken idea that photography is a transparent intermediary between observer and world). The invention of optical instruments depended more on shifts in regimes of vision—and thus on a new type of observer—than on technological advances. On the other hand, Pedro Miguel Frade, in his seminal book on photographic culture, highlights the perceptual shock caused by observing through a microscope or a telescope, and the consequent understanding of the revealed world. “The latter [the telescope],” he notes, “allowing a closer consideration (or consideratio, if one wishes to emphasize the oracular etymologies of the term) of the infinitely large, revealed it as an otherworld full of worlds; the former, turned downward, revealed our immediate surroundings as another world teeming with life, fascinatingly full of wonders, whose small scale in no way diminished—but rather emphasized—the admirable character of its perfection.”[2]

Imagining herself experiencing an विमान journey and looking through the window at the abstract, irregular matrix covering the world—focusing on the incisions and marks embedded in airport runways—the artist likewise appropriates the sense of wonder that only an initiatory and genuine experience can provide, translating it into a plastic exercise. Through successive enlargements of photographic images, traced with threads, she discovers that “otherworld full of worlds,” or more precisely, the ambiguities at the level of forms that such enlargement produces. There is, inevitably, an abandonment of the referent and, more specifically, of that fixed and stable world (doubly eliminated by the camera obscura and by the airplane journey), in favor of creating an abstract image that, through temporal and spatial unfolding under the action of movement and light (the latter responsible for granting dimension to time and thickness to space—space, if we recall Kant’s proposal, being only discoverable through the existence of time), perpetuates the hallucinatory and ghostly nature of the image. This is reinforced by the repetition of lines or subtle stippling that allows light to filter through (as in the works Ensaios sobre escalas, 2022). The very process of successive enlargement of aerial photographs removes the possibility of establishing proportional relationships with our bodies (a condition ambiguously emphasized by the hands in the photograph displayed at floor level), parodying our understanding of the world only to awaken the power of imagination.

It is no coincidence that one of the artist’s references is The Great Unreal, by Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, although she distances herself from their construction and manipulation techniques, creating—arguably—a more overwhelming experience due to the ambiguity of the formal structures she conceives, rather than through collage that reinforces fictional power. The phantasmagoria results less from concealing the process in favor of a fictional narrative constructed from real elements, and above all from the optical experience demanded, very subtly employing the persistence and mutation of images across various states—from positive to negative, from shadow to light…

In this way, Rafaela Lima’s work recovers the enigmatic illusion that images can still create—a potential arising from the very structure of the image and the experience it unfolds within our bodies—something that another shock, caused by the obtuse excess of images, has obscured. It thus situates itself—one might venture—within a new and urgent transformation of regimes of vision.

Susana Ventura
May 2024

^[1] Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer”, October 45 (1988: 3-35), 4.

^[2] Pedro Miguel Frade, Figuras do Espanto. A fotografia antes da sua cultura (Porto: Edições Asa, 1992).