Cássio Vasconcellos e as poéticas do espaço

Abstract

Cássio Vasconcellos has long circulated through the exposition space of contemporary photography, being recognized as one of the essential photographers of his generation in Brazil. However, the deepening of his poetics in literature at a level consistent with this free recognition is still a gap, so the present dissertation intends to broaden the study of his works in the direction of an attenuation of that hiatus. In this effort, it begins from a contemporary historical and cultural panorama, in which the works of Vasconcellos fit, being based mainly on recent studies of André Rouillé (about the photography as an expression) and of Helouise Costa and Renato Rodrigues da Silva (about the pioneering of photographic expression in Brazil as an inheritance for contemporary brazilian photographers). Given the multiple and lasting character of the Vasconcellos work, his photographic series are analyzed in two great temporal blocks, the first one concentrating in the 1980s and 1990s, from the beginning to the consolidation of his poetic formation, and the second one approaching the last decades, in which the photographer also uses digital resources and aerial images. The critical analysis of the images is guided by suggestions of Rudolf Arnheim and Martine Joly regarding the identification of visual data and the formulation of readings. During the analysis of about hundreds of Vasconcellos images, possible poetic nuclei are raised, based on recurrences in the way the photographer narrates the photographed spaces and their interactions with culture. As a conceptual link between these aspects, the research uses the conception of the poetic direction of Vasconcellos as a vertigo, as suggested in Eder Chiodetto's essay about the photographer, articulating it with the concept of estrangement in art, by Viktor Chklòvski. From this reencounter between Vasconcellos and theoretical clipping, the dissertation can finally propose four constitutive ways of vertigo in Vasconcellos open to connections with other photographers, suggesting poetic interactions between works. Thus, at the same time, we seek the consonance of the study with the efforts of understanding the present moment of the visual arts plus the indication of key readings of the works of Cássio Vasconcellos to future researches, whether these directly approach the work of this photographer, deal with space and its occupation, or with the more general field of photography and the poetics of the image.