The images comprised in ElefanteCidadeSerpente are written in a secret code, occupying a space between fantasy and experiment. Ms. Chemale finds traces of daily human actions in commonplace scenes through her appropriation of casual objects and spaces. Abstract scenes juxtapose figurative images in a saturated context. The real world becomes a virtual world. Particular realities present multiple meanings that attain their fullness when they meet the viewer.
The ELEFANTECIDADESERPENTE (ELEPHANTCITYSERPENT) book will be launched on May 8, 2008, together with a photographic exhibition, from 7 P.M., at Galeria dos Arcos at Usina do Gasômetro, Porto Alegre. It comprises seventy nine images inspired by daily life in large cities. The author, Fernanda Chemale, gathered for this project pictures produced between 1990 and 2007.
The hardcover book has 88 pages and 14x14cm (5.5X5.5 in). It was designed by Flávio Wild, containing testimonials of Porto Alegre artists, and an introduction text by Rubens Fernandes Junior. The artists invited for this project were: Alexandre Antunes, André Venzon, Bettina Muller, Deborah Finochiaro, Denise Gadelha, Eduardo Aigner, Eduardo Vieira da Cunha, Gelson Radaelli, Gisela Rodriguez, Hermes Bernardi Jr., Laura Leiner, Luiz Achutti, Otto Guerra, Paulo Scott, Plato Divorak, Rogério do Amaral Ribeiro, Tiago Flores, Wander Wildner, and Zoravia Bettiol. The other members of the team are: Paola Oliveira, artistic relations and production; Ana Ban, English translation; PR and publicity by Bebê Baumgarten and Natália Rizzi (assistant).
Ms. Chemale has authored a previous book, “Tempo de Rock e Luz” (A Time of Rock and Light), portraying a fragment of the rock scene in Porto Alegre. As photographer and visual artist, Ms. Chemale graduated in Social Communications at FAMECOS/PUC-RS. Since 1990, she has worked with both authorial and documentary photography and video. She exhibits her work regularly; she has had shows in Brazil’s main cities, as well as in other countries such as Portugal, Spain, Japan, Bolivia, France, and Germany. She teaches photography, both in universities and in other courses. She coordinated workshops for the Porto Alegre City’s Projeto de Descentralização da Cultura – SMC (Culture Decentralization Project of the City Agency of Culture). She has curated exhibitions for Olho Nu Photography Gallery, IFCH-UFRGS; for the CD Lory F.Band; for 8th and 9th editions of Porto Alegre em Cena Drama Festival’s homage ceremonies. Her images were acquired by the Pirelli-MASP permanent photography collection at Museu de Arte de São Paulo; by Fundación de Foto Y Cine Latinoaméricano in Paris; and by Museu do Brasil in Portugal. Currently, she is working with curatorship and historical and iconographical research for a book celebrating the 150th anniversary of Porto Alegre’s Theatro São Pedro. ElefanteCidadeSerpente has been taking part in many festivals, both in Brazil and abroad.

Support: Flor de Maçã, Atelier de Massas, Tecmasul, Contexto Agência de Artistas, Estúdio Nave, IdeaFixa,
Câmera Viajante, Casa do Filme, Céu Eventos, Citylab, Totosinho, Impresul, Dana.

Sponsorship: FUMPROARTE Fundo Municipal de Apoio à Produção Artística e Cultural (City Fund for Promoting Artistic and Cultural Production) Secretaria Municipal da Cultura / Prefeitura de Porto Alegre (City Agency of Culture / Porto Alegre City).

In my everyday life I find the images in ElefanteCidadeSerpente [ElephantCitySerpent]. I look for traces of a urban man and I take his objects and spaces to myself. Situations present themselves in obvious casual actions. Exploring human tracks, I see just how particular anonymity in large cities is, and just how my subconscious disrupts everything. Everything that is interior becomes exterior, suppressing the boundaries between reality and imagination. Building images, I summon other worlds, suggesting reality dimensions often enigmatic. In this environment, my spectator is invited to decipher them.
Occult, paradoxical, and subversive photography.
Abstract superposes figurative.
A saturated context.
The real world becomes a virtual world.

Fernanda Chemale
March 2008

Cities and Their Expressive Cracks
To see the city, to record its daily life, to feel its irritating pulse, to sense its unrelenting movement. When you see a city, you do not necessarily see truth. This is precisely the main idea that passes by Fernanda Chemale’s ElefanteCidadeSerpente [ElephantCitySerpent], where she took up the challenge of creating a photographic collection of cities today without committing to photographing buildings, avenues, people; in short, the socio-cultural history of urban spaces. Her images are icons of a walker’s purest momentary ephemeral sensation.
Fernanda decides to look at the city by photographing it in a speedy-zapping vision, allowing us, her readers, to be partially responsible for putting together her amazing kaleidoscopes. Her sharp perception, combined to a fantastic sense of fluid, plastic unity, allows heterogenic and discontinuous elements existing in contemporary metropolis to emerge as synthesis materializing her free expressive gesture.
Her image fragments are arranged in weird framings, forming casual geometries and illogical designs. Her images highlight distortions, juxtapositions, movements, colors, lights; everything as if in an indecisive game that does not always allow us to elucidate the mysteries of the visible world, despite being captured by the camera. In her facing of the cities, Fernanda intends to interrelate shapes, to open expressive cracks in a space busied by daily actions, to highlight lights and shadows involving the scene, to frame landscapes in rearview mirrors, to materialize the tensions present in everything visible composing spaces.
The edition of ElefanteCidadeSerpente, too, adopts the idea of serializing fragments in order to enhance the unity of the book. Fernanda embraces her images produced in movement (in part from a moving car) and, therefore, her photographic gesture is a performance, as we see subjective-strong images, almost immediately unidentifiable, which forces us to reflect upon what we see and to try to imagine this creative wish expanding to the visible world.
The city represents a large conglomerate of buildings, most of them solid and unchangeable; while a walking photographer must elucidate urban spaces as a slimy fluid feeding on the power of strange paths almost randomly traced by men. It is a kind of understanding of the city as a space that must be traversed and perceived through an artist’s essential curiosity. In this essay, especially, we can see photography captured at its own gesture of construction, a gesture that leaves its traces on the image’s materiality.
English painter Francis Bacon used to say, “To figure, instead of achieving, materialization through image torsions and deformities.” Fernanda Chemale created spots of light, color, and movement, with strange noises, juxtapositions, and distortions; bringing her glance closer to contemporary Brazilian photography’s active and innovative vision.
Rubens Fernandes Junior
Photography researcher and critic, March 2008