Felipe Cama

O Meu Eu Mesmo Faço - by Paula Braga

The floor of the gallery is covered with grass, demarcating a green square. On the back wall there is a small photo. You have to cross the grass field to see the picture. To do this, there is a suggested path, defined with white stones above the grass. By taking the marked path or crossing the field diagonally - the shortest distance between the entry point and the photograph - the viewer reaches the image. What he sees is a field of grass over which a spontaneous path has been opened by the constant stepping of passers-by. Whoever arrives at the photograph through the path marked by the white stones feels too obedient, in a situation where nothing would prevent the opening of one's own path. The work is “O meu eu mesmo faço”, by Felipe Cama, installed at the Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto, in 2006.

The art institution is a space full of rules: don't touch, don't photograph, don't run. An invisible power - maybe the special lighting, maybe the sacred aura of the works' financial value - presupposes that one speaks softly and that one follows the rules, even the non-existent ones. Felipe Cama's work immediately makes us laugh at this behavior: if I don't discuss a rule as absurd as "don't photograph" in the middle of the era of unlimited distribution of images, if I don't dare step on the artificial turf of this work, inside an art institution - this art that for at least fifty years has defended resistance -(1) how will I behave outside the museum? Trusting that the rules have been written by a supreme power and must therefore always be obeyed? Works such as My Own Do Just Right point in the opposite direction. And this is already well known by the layers less favored by the rules of our society: electric cats, tracks in the hills, labyrinths of alleys are the spontaneous paths - of those who live and survive by inventing their own resources; they mark the natural flows that the rule should simply ratify, following the collective will.

In the same way that the role of the artist, for Hélio Oiticica, is to "arouse in the participant, who is the former viewer, states of invention", the urban-architect would be the arouser, the translator, and the catalyst of the inhabitants' desires. He would start from the idea of an organized laissez-faire; he would start, for example, from the principle that the best way to create a pedestrian path on a lawn is by seeing the trail left in the vegetation by the passers-by themselves.(2)

The idea of the path spontaneously opened in the grass, in Felipe Cama's work, leads us to an approximation between contemporary art and the smooth space of nomadic thinking - of thinking as a war machine, as defined by Gilles Deleuze. Like the white stones, which, in Cama's work, define a predictable path and the ordered movement - the distance between the stones even defines the width of the step -, the striated space is a grid that only admits pre-defined movements. The smooth space, on the other hand, "is the place of flows, of free movements, of turbulence, of becoming (there is nothing pre-configured in it)". (3)

It is interesting to note the geometric coincidence of concepts such as Deleuze's striated space and Jacques Ranciere's sharing of the sensible. Both presuppose a background grid, a space of limited and predefined movement, to be transgressed. Both advocate a rupture of the striations, the lines of delimitation, that restrict movement in the world. In Ranciere, the lines that define a sharing of the sensible are drawn with the ruler of the division of labor, of the doing that falls to each one and that establishes competences to interfere in the common. (4) For Deleuze, the codifications that demarcate the lines of the striated (or sedentary) space come from the law, the contract, and the institutions (5). Rancière, thus, provides an escape route more accessible to the individual: whatever laws, contracts, and institutions may say, it is in the hand of each one, in the doing, that resides the possibility of escaping from a predefined model of division of the sensible: to be a nomad who cuts his way through the grass, ignoring the landscape's well-established path of stones. The work of art can be a war machine that incites the authorship of its own paths, for one must first know that there is the possibility of escaping the grid, towards a smooth space.

In the series Street View Landscapes, Felipe Cama investigates the cooling of virtual space by using two tools for mapping the planet, Google Maps and Google Street View. The artist searches these virtual maps for points mentioned by landscape painters throughout the history of art. Thus, he finds Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire, Vermeer's view of Delft, El Greco's view of the city of Toledo, Frans Post's Saint Francis River. He then shows us, using Google Street View images, a recent image of these places, these points mapped by art history, blending the record of the past with the record of the present. The resulting image is cut by a grid of thin lines, which form small squares, like pixels, above the low resolution photograph, which reveals the digital origin of the image used. Below the image, the artist adds the point on the map referring to that scene, also according to the mapping of the world done by Google Maps. Now, we have here the superposition of several grids, several striated spaces: the history of art, the mapping of the planet by a company that today is the strongest reference in indexing information, and the grid itself, which cuts the canvas into small squares. How to make of so many grids a smooth space?

Before answering, let us compare this work with another artistic production that uses mappings of the world. The artist Fernando Velázquez searches for points of intersection of the grid formed by the lines of latitude and longitude in the work Discontinuous Landscape. Collective authorship enters this work on several levels: the spectator is invited to send a text message (SMS) to a certain cell phone number. This message contains two numbers: a latitude and a longitude. A computer program searches the confluence.org website for photographs of the location defined by the chosen latitude-longitude pair, and assembles a real-time movie with the photographs it finds from that location. In turn, confluence.org is made collectively. People from all over the world visit confluences of latitude and longitude that are whole numbers, such as 12 South -52 East. Each visitor photographs the location by turning the camera to the four cardinal points. What other ways of recording a point on the planet exist? Collecting soil or stones from the place, as Marcelo Moscheta does, for example. (6) The option to collect digital images facilitates the networked distribution and storage of a representation of place. The four photographs recording views of the four cardinal points according to the latitude/longitude pair selected are stored on confluence.org, together with an account of the trip to the place. Brazil, for example, has 731 points of confluence of latitudes and longitudes, 365 of which are already recorded. (7) The striated space has been subverted by a profusion of amateur images representing the Earth's surface. This does not completely erase the lines of demarcation, but gives the anonymous photographer the possibility to record, in his or her own way, each point on the grid, and hang on it an intimate account of the journey he or she made to that point.

The grid then becomes a network of explorers of specific points on Earth. There is not so much difference between recording one of these points or - sending a postcard saying "I'm still alive", as On Kawara did. We are still recording the most basic messages: I exist, I was here. Fernando Velázquez offers visitors to his work the possibility to compose a film using the images of anonymous travelers.

So we have two forms of mapping the world based on database images. While Discontinuous Landscape, by Velázquez, collects its images in an anonymous network of image generators, the work Street View Landscapes, by Cama, searches images of the planet generated by a central command, Google Street View. The parameters for deciding which point on the planet to explore lie in a grid that is respected (latitude-longitude) in Velázquez, and in a grid of the most famous landscapes in the history of painting, in Cama. The smoothing of the grids that underlie the two works takes place in the generation of a third slippery and blurred element: the algorithmically generated movies of Velázquez or the low-resolution images of Cama. Moreover, both smooth out the space by decontextualizing the original works - calling here both the amateur's photographic record and Vermeer's landscape painting.

Decontinuous landscape defines an alternative territory, another map, another cartography, different from that offered by an atlas. And the "landscape-gem painting" of the network era, of the era of collective construction of subjective topologies, of a "I do it myself" type of world posture.

The society of the network age should be less obedient to striated spaces. The topology of the network immediately points to the tangled intertwining of threads that make a rhizome. There are so many paths on the net, like the roots of a lawn, that each one could make their own, as Felipe Cama's work suggests. But we agree too much with terms and conditions that we have not read.

(1), Gilles Deleuze. "O ato de criação", Folha de S. Paulo, 27 iun. 1999. Repu­blished in Rodrigo Duarte (org.). O belo autônomo: textos clássicos de estética. Belo Hori­zonte: Autêntica/Crisálida, 2012.

(2) Paola Berenstein Jacques. Estética da ginga: a arquitetura das favelas através da obra de Hélio Oiticica. Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2oo1, p. 1.51. 

(3) Regina Schõpke. Por uma filosofia da diferença: Gilles Deleuze, o pensa­dor nômade. Rio de Janeiro: Contra­ponto / São Paulo: Edusp, 2oo4, p. 171.

(4) Jacques Ranciere. A partilha do sensí­vel. São Paulo: EXO experimental / Edi­tora 34, 2005, p. 17. 

(5) Schõpke, op. cit., p. 173.

(6) Marcelo Mos­cheta. São Paulo: Bei, 2011.

(7) Available in: www.confluence.org.

Written in 2012 as part of post-doctoral research conducted at the Institute of Arts at Unicamp, under the supervision of Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto, with support from the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Fapesp). Published in the book Arte Contemporânea: Modos de Usar, by Paula Braga (Elefante Publishing - 2021)