Renata de Bonis

fossil-drama

The downtown São Paulo constant pulsation took me to select those images, thinking in the repetition, the rhythm and the time as elementary principles to natural and human experience, existing since the heartbeats and the breathing, until the planets and stars orbital system which defines our calendar and everyday cycles. The photographs were taken in a study field trip to the countryside during my residency at Pivô Research in 2016 second semester.

The images portrait rocky formations with geological relevance, composed by repeated succession of layers and rhythmic sedimentations. Within the rock layers are found invertebrate animal fossils, their marks and remains of their bodies movement and displacement, which date from 280 millions of years, when the region went through a long glaciation period in its lakes and rivers.

The life in a metropolis such São Paulo makes the understanding of such temporal dimension extremely difficult, however it’s possible to draw parallels between the sedimentary rocks formation and the infinite buildings erected in the center of the city, the dull accumulation of materials such as cement, concrete, plaster, paint, tar, metallic structures that form apartments, rooms, flats, overlays of floors, of lives of different routines, one atop the other, and so we walk cyclically until everything becomes a peculiar urban formation, hardened and rigid, with frozen footsteps in fossilized traces.

Renata De Bonis

February 2017