Elide, tell me about your dreams
Exposed at festival Mesnographies, 5th edition, from 7th juin to 14th july 2025,
Les Mesnuls, France
Rétrospective des cinq ans, Regards sur le littoral breton,
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff, Paris, from 28th july to 23th september 2023
Songe
Final exhibition of the residency BZH PHOTO 2021, Loguivy-de-la-mer, France
Echouage
Scenographic device by the architects collective “Exercice” for the image “Goémon”,
made during the residency and exposed at Festival BZH PHOTO en 2021, Loguivy-de-la-mer, France
Test to move to the beginning
Residency restitution exhibition at the Tignous Center for Contemporary Art, Montreuil, France, from October 9 to 31, 2020
TEST TO MOVE TO THE BEGINNING
by Fernanda Tafner Curatorial
Curatorial text by Ângela Berlinde
It is said that children bring in their gaze a limpid and transparent vision when discovering the world, as one who devours it, in a kind of inevitable magical attraction.
Fernanda Tafner immerses herself in the magic cauldron of childhood and, holding hands with the children of Montreuil, builds, in a free and intuitive way, an essay that leads us to question the beauty of initial things, humanity’s true place, and its connection — sometimes strange, sometimes familiar — with nature.
Thrown into the constellations of childhood’s universe, the Brazilian photographer living in France invites us to view the world upside down, to find ourselves in revelations that throb like heartbeats that mark the rhythm, sometimes wise and sometimes innocent, of a heart divided between body and spirit. Her work synthesizes a kind of symbiosis, intertwining her gaze with the poetry of Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros. With Tafner, the observer is caught off-guard in a challenge to join the fragments of this game between photography and poetry, marked by two paths: “that of sensibility which is the understanding of the body, and that of intelligence which is the understanding of the spirit”. If the poet Manoel de Barros writes with his body, the artist confesses that she photographs with her mouth, in a primitive metaphor of devouring the world with her eyes.
The vision of an arapuca,(ara'pukain tupi-guarani), a musical trap of indigenous origin intended for bird hunting, anticipates the multiple analogies and dead ends of life, where the artist invites us on a poetic and existential stroll. In a kind of spiral at the intersections of the mind, awakened by the magic of the camera, Fernanda invites us to play, but it is in silence that we find ourselves facing the dilemma: Will we be the hunted or the hunters? — Torn between the gaze that desires and that which is desired, the artist takes a posture of ambivalence in which she is at times the character projected in the work, at other times the observer. Thus, she composes, step by step, her visual strategy: the magic of photography extends to the desirous eye, capable of undressing, devouring or exalting, deconstructing and transforming the image.
Fernanda Tafner proposes a hybrid trip to the beginning of things, in a diffusely allegorical series, confirming Walter Benjamin's statement that allegory is the only amusement that the melancholic, otherwise very intense, allows himself. In an exchange of playful knowledge with the children, between the ancestral and the contemporary, the artist indulges in a psychological adventure around the image, in search of answers for the present, digging into layers of the imaginary that have been superimposed throughout history. In this sense, photography gives the observer with a certain experience, which is to glimpse what is hidden in reality. Thus, in Benjamin’s words, in the same way that psychoanalysis reveals, behind banal and known things, an “instinctual unconscious”, photography works an “optical unconscious”. In this dialogue between photography and psychoanalysis which points to the discontinuity between apparent content and latent content, photography reveals that small “spark of chance”, imperceptible and operating at the unconscious level, thus allowing access to obscure areas that the eye cannot capture. Precisely because it captures a given instant, photography offers the discovery of those moments that escape perception, before a world that doesn’t stop changing, “except the clouds, and under them, in a force field of torrents and explosions, the fragile and tiny human body”. [Benjamin 1985]
By incorporating photographic image into her speech, Fernandas's artwork poetically whispers what one doesn't necessarily see when one focuses only on the most visible aspects of the picture. By doing so, her pieces invite us to navigate the deepest layers of the image, unveiling and bringing to light what was once obscure. The installation proposed here resembles a large board game made up of the electric colors of the wild creatures of the forest, which, with anthropomorphic grace, are precipitated into hyper-realistic collages, developed by young artists. Assembled at different scales and dimensions, their compositions become a mosaic traversed by endless puzzles. It is, after all, the genesis of childhood, with all its inquisitiveness, that leads us to seriously investigate the world.
The artist dares to open a place where the imaginary becomes a large playground — ample and random, labyrinthine and metamorphic — in which she allows herself to be entangled and seeks to interpret, in a kind of secret that hovers in the encounter between experience and contemplation. It is impossible to not be moved by her restless gaze, fluttering in the face of the reverse side of humanity. We can’t help but accept her invitation to invent new beginnings.
1 BENJAMIN Walter, Petite histoire de la photographie, 2004
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Matières à penser
Exhibition at Centre Tignous d’Art Contemporain, Montreuil, France, from 11th october to
14th december 2019
Fernanda Tafner’s Hands
by Romain Arazm
Text published in Point contemporain in 2020
Whether dirty or washed, on the heart, in the air or even at the bottom of pockets, the hands are much more than the simple end of the arm to which they are anatomically connected. Some speak with rare eloquence. The attuned ear of Brazilian photographer Fernanda Tafner was able to capture their discreet speech and allow us better hear it.
From those painted in negative on the walls of prehistoric caves to the countless sketches in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and including those nearly touching each other on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, hands — like faces — require every ounce of every artist’s virtuosity.
Directing the viewer’s eye, they easily compensate for the muteness of the painting and the photographer.
In the panoptic installation from her series Manners(2018), the hands photographed by Fernanda Tafner in the Paris Metro occupy the center of what one would be tempted to continue to call "portraits".
Neat, manicured, callused, tattooed or richly adorned with all kinds of jewelry, these modern-day mudrasare true concentrates of identity. “They are the center of a small world” recalls the artist, who immortalizes them daily, as discreetly as possible, using her cell phone. By isolating the hands of strangers she sits in front of during a Metro ride, Fernanda Tafner's lens manages to create an intimacy that is rarely present in a metropolis’ transport system. In a completely different register, the Tactileseries, also presented in the exhibition “Matter to think About”at Montreuil’s Tignous Contemporary Art Center, offers a sensory experience linked to touch. Bathed in the natural light of a photo studio, the body of Volmir Cordeiro (a professional Brazilian dancer) seems on the verge of disappearing into the margins of these ambitious frames. Because here, once again, it is the choreography of the hands in the air and on the skin of the model that holds Fernanda Tafner's attention. Through a rigorous work on light, on colors and through subtle texture effects, the materiality of the dancing body becomes strange and questions the porosity of the borders between movement and inertia, life and morbidity.
Because in the history of evolution understanding is a happy consequence of the capacity for gripping, the hands have enabled Man, groping in the darkness of a world which seems to him full of dangers, to embrace it with tenderness.