Rosângela Rennó Encounters — Rosângela Rennó

Upon entering the space of the imposing Grote Kerk Breda Breda church, visitors will soon stumble upon a surprising sight. They will notice that a soft reddish-orange cover, has been laid on top of the stone floor. Walking across this surface leaves one in a somewhat suspended state, senses slightly dampened. This effect, produced by the encounter between the building, its history, and a contemporary intervention – an interference no doubt – is conducive towards reflection.

The person responsible for this ‘magic’ trick is artist Rosângela Rennó, whose solo exhibition, her largest in The Netherlands to date, takes over this landmark building in its entirety. A series of multimedia installations, including photography and video, engage themes related to colonialism, empire, history and identity, gathered around the site-specific Resistance of Breda or Las Lápidas (2024) which acts as a connecting element, the exhibition’s narrative thread.

Encouraging reflection is part of the intention behind the exhibition as a whole, which is meant to serve as a type of device, activated by the viewers presence. It can, if used correctly, create bridges between the past, present and (potentially) future, as well as geographies that were once connected yet which have been misaligned by time and forgetting.

Although correctness is a risky notion to contemplate in a context where time, memory and belief remain in flux, continuously altering perception. Indeed, memory, as it turns out, is riddled with gaps. Soon enough, the red-orange cover will stop at the boundary of some very physical gaps, surgically executed cuts, selectively revealing memorial plaques and tombstones embedded in the church’s floor. Some are inscribed with texts, others with images as well, and various decorative elements. All show signs of deterioration, quite a few having been almost entirely erased by the passage of time. Stained, marked, they even carry signs of breakage, and restorations, sutures meant to reinstate the integrity of their surface. The majority can only be read via rubbings, an important detail which brings the artist’s act of pointing out, highlighting, in spatial and conceptual terms, closer to the photographic process. Positive and negative. An approximation, nothing more. The installation amplifies the space of the church, emphasising its monumentality, while drawing attention to the less visible aspects of its history. In a subtle yet provocative manner, the piece raises awareness to the little known but important interconnected history of Brazil and The Netherlands.

Indeed, very few people today have even heard of Dutch Brazil. Also known as Nieuw-Holland or New Holland, the territory spanned the region of Pernambuco – much larger than the current state by the same name – and was colonised between 1630 and 1654 under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company. Although claimed by the Portuguese following its ‘discovery’ (an episode that takes centre stage in Rennó’s film Vera Cruz from 2000), Brazil was coveted by all European colonial powers. Early on, Dutch commercial interests and Portuguese imperial ambitions had been intertwined as part of the highly profitable sugar trade. The Dutch made several forays in the region of Bahia, attacking the capital Salvador in 1604, 1624 and 1627.

Switching tactics after these failed campaigns, they attempted to conquer the captaincy of Pernambuco instead, and succeeded in 1630 after taking over the capital Olinda and the town of Recife. It deserves mention that during this period, from 1580 until 1640, Portugal came under Spanish rule as part of the Iberian Union, and thus clashed directly with the Dutch due to ongoing conflicts. The city of Breda was in fact controlled by Spain between 1581 and 1590, then again following a ten-month siege from 1624 to 1625 – the same year Salvador was reconquered from the Dutch by the Portuguese – until 1637. During its most prosperous years, Nieuw-Holland was governed by Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen from the capital Mauritsstad. Significantly, the Dutch controlled not only the production of sugar but also the slave trade from Africa via territorial gains including the Dutch Gold Coast and Loango-Angola. At its peak, New Holland dominated global sugar production. With Nassau- Siegen’s return to Europe in 1644 the so-called guerras brasilicas began and Portuguese and Brazilian troupes finally managed to recapture the territory in 1654.

The exhibition takes historic transnational connections as its starting point, and explores, via several bodies of work, the shared – and sometimes parallel histories – between Western European countries, the so-called ‘New World’ and the legacy of colonialism. The series Living Things (2024) zooms in on a detail within the urban fabric, the pelourinho or pillory, as an artifact that is exemplary of this complicated connection to history. Originally used in Portugal during the Middle Ages, pelourinhos were installed in city centres as markers of authority, also used for public punishment. Brought to Brazil during the colonial period, they were used almost exclusively for punitive purposes, commonly against enslaved Africans. Today, in Portugal, these artifacts are seen as monuments, neatly preserved, otherwise forgot- ten, while in Brazil they serve as reminders of a painful, and not so distant past since slavery was only abolished in 1888. This would explain their poor general state, either due to deliberate damage or neglect. As Rennó points out, in Salvador which witnessed the brutal mistreatment of Black citizens for generations, all that is left of the pelourinho is its name, demarcating the city’s historic centre.

Vera Cruz (2000) is based on Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letters concerning the ‘discovery’ of Brazil during Pedro Álvares Cabral’s voyage of 1500. This ‘(im)possible film’, as described by the artist, grapples with the contradictions inherent in any historic account especially when skewed towards the victor’s side. Yet the artist’s choice of words from amongst Caminha’s epistolary fragments is deliberate, directing critical distance. The film narrates the first encounter between Portuguese conquistadors and Indigenous peoples, as if photographic technology would have existed at the time. The outcome of this exercise, is a type of tabula rasa, a sequence of empty frames, full of scratches, glitches, and stains, upon which fantasies of domination and control are superimposed through subtitles. Alternatively, one might read this film as having been deliberately erased due to the fallacies it showed, how it disguised a brutal encounter as a quasi-fairytale to legitimize the foundation of a new nation, a brave new world

Mutatis Mutandis (2024) returns to the notion of the fragment through a set of saintly figurines found by the artist at flea markets in the city of Natal, incidentally known as New Amsterdam during the Dutch occupation. They would have been used in popular contexts by Christian worshippers, passed on from one generation to another. Far from the preciousness of high-value religious artifacts, the wear and tear visible on the surface of these items nevertheless hints at their extensive and devout usage. Attempted ‘restorations’ by untrained hands have led to an accumulation of many layers of paint, revealing heavily damaged surfaces, covered in cracks. Contemplating the impossibility of repair, Rennó further draws these out by minutiously applying gold leaf onto the photographic print. The piece ‘highlights the distorted, the monstruous, that is, the consequences of irreparable harm’, as she explains.

The past comes back to haunt and unsettle in the Colonial Crime Cabinet (2024), which was created for the Princes’ Chapel at the Grote Kerk Breda. This is where the first Prince of Orange-Nassau, predecessor for the Royal House of The Netherlands is buried alongside other members of the Nassau family. Rennó’s polyptych takes as its starting point the Monument to the Portuguese Colonising Effort which was designed by Sousa Caldas and Alferes Alberto Ponce de Castro on the occasion of the Colonial Exhibition of 1934 in Porto. Erected during the Estado Novo which glorified Portugal’s colonial past, the monument encapsulates the era’s far-right nationalist ethos by extolling authority, equating citizenship with service to the nation. Six figures were chosen to embody the ‘colonising effort’: the merchant, the farmer, the missionary, the soldier, the physician and a woman, representative of a whole class of secondary citizens whose entire existence is reduced to nurturing the nation. Rennó creates a photographic frieze by removing these figures from their pedestal, using gold leaf yet again to draw attention to their symbolism and the dangers in forgetting the harms of history. The monument – and here parallels with Living Things arise – has been contested in recent years, defaced and spraypainted in protest, while serving as a gathering point for neo-fascists.

During the past four decades, the artist has been collecting fragments of text from newspapers and magazines referencing photographs, as part of her project Universal Archive (1992–2024). At times prosaic, other times uncanny, even shocking, the instances chosen for Grote Kerk Breda resonate with a number of ‘universal’ themes including: power and vanity, by relation to royalty, the church and the state; death; miracles and apparitions; ghosts and haunting, by relation to Indigenous resistance, colonialism and political violence especially. Translated into multiple languages and engraved onto pristine marble-like surfaces, the texts ‘invade’ the interior of the Grote Kerk Breda, taking on new meanings, revealing deeper and often disturbing implications. Nevertheless, the images fail to materialise, and remain at best figments of the viewers’ imagination.

Several common themes emerge across these bodies of work. We might consider, for instance, the importance of photography as a means of inscribing (transcribing?) information, and also of exploring incongruities within the historic record, working with memory. We could think about the relationship between the negative and positive within the photographic processes illustrated here and also via the engraved surfaces of the Universal Archive which resemble the memorial plaques or Lápidas strewn around the church. The image as an entity emerging from a flat surface, is coupled here with the notion of photography as an invocation, summoning the past. Alternatively, we might think of photography a means to trouble, unsettle the past, which anyhow can’t ever be fixed.

We often tell ourselves stories that pacify the past, conveniently hiding that which we fear the most, forgetting that the past is indeed inescapable. While opening up these difficult, painful questions, the exhibition nevertheless carves out space to potentially find means to repair, to mend, even heal, within the monumental interior of a former spiritual abode. Rosângela Rennó’s work is about all this and much more, enabling journeys through the past, through memory, engaging archives of many types (official, personal, vernacular), journeys of images, following haphazard, often surprising cues, going on tangents, leading one astray yet always questioning the status quo, countering forgetting, confronting fixed narratives head on.

SELEJAN, Ileana. Rosângela Rennó Encounters | Encontros. In: Publication BredaPhoto Festival Journeys, 2024, p. 146-171, exh. cat.