Janaina Wagner
1989 | São Paulo, Brazil
Lives in Roubaix and São Paulo
Visual artist and professor, graduated in visual arts and journalism from FAAP-SP and ECA-USP, PhD student at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. She works with drawing, painting, photography, installation and scenography, approaching the relations of limit, control and containment that humans establish with the world. She has participated in several artistic residencies such as Gasworks, London, England (2021); FID Campus – Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, France (2019); and Bolsa Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2016). She has taken part in exhibitions at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany (2022); Nube, Santa Cruz, Bolivia (2021); Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro (2020); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2017); and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2014). She lives between Roubaix and São Paulo.
Cinema Caverna (Quebrante), 2023
Video, 25'
Cinema Caverna [Cave Cinema] explores the ruins of the TransAmazonian highway and its phantasmagoria, and nods to Robert Smithson’s The truly underground cinema idea, which, if executed, would have installed an actual cinema inside a cave. In the video, the moon breaks protocol and rises inside a cavern in Rurópolis, Pará, a company town built for workers laying the BR-163 back in the 1970s. It is here that the artist tells the history of the highway, stone by stone, and of its many ghosts and characters, such as the famous Erismar—who, fascinated with caves, discovered many of those cataloged in the region today. In one of these caves, the artist engineers an unlikely encounter and engenders, through image and narrative, a spellbinding atmosphere that locks the viewer away in a spatiotemporal dimension on the fringes of the habitual, where the ideas of progress and legacy are born of the intertwining and overlapping of the “Ley lines” running through narratives, facts, images, and memories.