The exhibition project Counting Routines is composed of a selection of installations of Mental Maps, which the artist calls Large Canvases, and of the tallies of the passing of time made by the Brazilian artist Ana Amorim (São Paulo, 1956) from the 1980s up to the present day. As a result of the strict daily routines, both conceptual and performative, followed by Amorim, her artistic output has acquired monumental dimensions. Brought together here is a selection of 23 works in a variety of sizes, supports and formats, presenting her consistent artistic practice over the last four decades.
The exhibition is based on two of the main activities of Ana Amorim’s life-practice: the daily routines with which she registers the drawn or embroidered Mental Maps, and her conceptual performances of Counting Seconds. These practices exemplify the commitment with which the artist applies herself to the recording of her life and to the narration – far removed from any aestheticism – of the reality around her, in the recurrences of which her career is deeply and dramatically involved.
Pictures: Juan Barajas
Counting Routines
Such is the adventure of counting time that we are not even sure when the first prototype of a modern clock was built, although it is beyond doubt that the mechanical clock had become a fact of daily life throughout most of Europe by 1300.[1] We know that, placed high on a tower, it changed the lives of peasants and merchants, citizens and administrators. We went from ‘natural’ time to the time of mechanical measurement. The daily routine could be counted – recounted – precisely and meticulously.
Ana Amorim counts seconds and she does so with horizontal dashes in notebooks and on sheets of paper. This is not the poetic romance of the prisoner scoring lines on the cell wall—which, in any case, would have counted days. It is the politics of submitting to the rebellious routine of counting for the sake of counting, in defiance of an age that counts to produce. It is the rebellion of counting as a routine and of the routine of counting that Amorim also practices in her Mental Maps with the number 365/366 as a reference for what she must produce in a year, day by day.
The maps of Africa are drawn with the colonial ruler and set square. The map of Palestine shrinks by the decade and by blood spilled. Ana Amorim’s maps are obstinately sinuous and routine and exorcise in each stroke the misuse that the West has made, and makes, of maps, and instead limit them to mere records of the everyday, of simple human things, rather than traces of great deeds.
The books and the pages of Ana Amorim’s Counting Seconds benefit from the evolution of the codex and its rituals as well as from the whole torrent of changes that it has ‘suffered’ in the course of a history that was to lead to the notebook and the book and, of course, to the personal diary, of which she is a practitioner.
The routine creation and silent copying of these codices should not be forgotten. The books and pages that concern us here are created routinely and with the author keeping silence, in a kind of ritual in which time is the theme, the protagonist and at the same time a veiled citation of the less than happy global reality that surrounds the counting.
She does not count the minutes just anywhere; she frequently chooses places with a strong semantic and symbolic charge, where something significant is happening or has happened, or counts at home in a private routine.
Voluntary routines have something of an escape from the horrible. Sydney Smith wrote to offer his beloved Georgiana a set of prescriptions to help lift her chronic depression. He begins his letter with ‘Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done, so I feel for you’, and among many other recommendations tells her: ‘Don’t expect too much from human life – a sorry business at the best.’[2]
In Ana Amorim’s work, and in conversations with her, that ‘sorry business’ often crops up, not in an existentialist way but in a sense inflected by the amount of information that brings us up to date with the sorry state of international affairs that engenders anger and a sense of impotence. This is confirmed by routines such as Not in My Name, 2020-3 and Narratives, in which the artist notes what makes her uncomfortable and can do nothing about. In these three routines she develops everything that she seems to escape from by counting time in her books so that, far from being meditative exercises, these are actions that point out what is weighty, what is inevitable.
Umberto Eco proposed the following: ‘the other form of representation suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the list, or catalogue.’[3] Eco also dedicated a section to visual lists and specifically – something far from obvious in this age of archive culture – refers to paintings of battles and still lifes, which always tend to extend virtually beyond the frame.
Are Ana Amorim’s works maps, sheets and books, or are they lists? The two things are not mutually exclusive, but there is a temptation to think of her work as a routine composition of them, with their items in the form of pages of vertical lines and Mental Maps composed of fragments.
It is difficult to frame Ana Amorim’s works precisely because they would extend beyond that framework, since above all they are endless accounts that, although they stop at a certain moment, tend to infinity.
In the chapter dealing with these lists, Eco cites the principle of enumeration that can be found in other arts that are not painting: ‘Ravel’s “Bolero” with its obsessive rhythm suggests that it could continue infinitely […].’[4]
Can the books in Counting Seconds be considered artist’s books? Definitely not. They are not consumable objects but the results of a performative activity with its own scenario. Mediators that are also taken to the wall or the display case. In the words of Diana Taylor, they are in the midst of the collaboration between the archive and the repertoire, between what is written and what the body accumulates through the repetition of its gestures. And that collaboration is indivisible.
The artist’s maps inevitably remind us of maps from earlier times, yet they have been made in the era of oppressive hyperwriting.
The Bedolina map found in the Valcamonica, which dates from around 2500 years ago, bears a very close resemblance to some of those drawn by Ana Amorim, though it comes to us without the complete context that the artist gives us in hers as a historian of herself and with different codes.
We must not forget the video recordings of her performances of Counting Seconds, nor her evolution from the intimate or museographic space to a space in which two things occur: reality is in conflict and Ana Amorim counts seconds imperturbably.
The story of the diarists has taken place in the intimacy of the lack of the right to express oneself. The ‘diaries’ we are talking about here are written in public (Counting Seconds) and their reading could easily be a monotonous scream.
The smooth flow of Ana Amorim’s large canvases is split by cracks where ghosts sneak in, as can be seen in the agglomerating routine NOT IN MY NAME, large and full of negatives, which came out of a placard in the hands of the parents of a victim of the attack on the Twin Towers with the phrase ‘Not in our son’s name’, a slogan which subsequently spread in the form of ‘Not in our name’ to other cities after 9/11 in protest at the plan to attack Afghanistan.
Ultimately, none of Ana Amorim’s agreeable works is free of stifled protests and subtle sobs, albeit concealed by her routine work which requires that we know how to read between the lines, except when, as in the routine just mentioned, the impotence erupts.
Jorge Blasco Gallardo
[1] Alfred Crosby, La medida de la realidad. Barcelona: Crítica, 1998, p. 73.
[2] Quoted in Shaun Usher, Listas Memorables. Barcelona: Salamandra, 2016.
[3] Umberto Eco and Alastair McEwen, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay. New York: Random House, 2009, p. 17.
[4] Ibid., p. 47.
In 1988, I decided that my life was art.
I understood art as a sequence of meaningful mental and emotional experiences deeply rooted in my surroundings and in the significant relations I established in my everyday life.
That same year, I started the 10-Year Performance Project (1988-1997).
This project consisted in registering daily mental maps in books, at the end of each day, for a period of 10 years.
These maps would later be transferred to different supports called Large Canvases, consisting of large calendar year series of works.
The guidelines for this project were:
- The project would have a duration of 10 years, ending in 1997.
- The maps would be produced every day, at the end of each day.
- The maps produced would serve as raw material for the “Large Canvases”.
- I would use as little time as possible in producing the maps.
- I would reduce my production to the bare minimum.
- I would use inexpensive materials.
- I would only exhibit in free or public spaces, that would not charge for admission.
- I would not sell the work.
During the process, I realized that the element of "routine" had become central to my project. The 10-Year Performance Project has been extended since the year 2000 and is now my reality.
12 pieces
Acrylic on canvas (approx. 45 x 63.5 cm, each piece / approx. 1.84 x 1.94 m, total)
In 1987 I was looking for a way to register evidences of my being alive. I decided to draw daily Mental Maps of my routes during the day. In order to do that, I had to find a form for these maps. Initially I used color to register each map, but later concluded that since I was registering a finished experience, which were my movements during the day, I shouldn’t use color as it creates a present experience. This work is the final format I chose for my daily Mental Maps, which I have been drawing ever since.
The work was originally a single canvas, which in 1989 I decided to cut into 12 pieces, transforming it from a painting into information.
Single piece
Acrylic, pencil and white watercolor pencil on canvas
(approx. 129.5 x 179 cm)
Chart with the number of hours and minutes I lived on each day in 1989 plus 19 days in 1990.
This is a conceptual piece that expands the Mental Map to include the number of hours and minutes I lived each day, as an evidence of my being alive. In itself it is an attempt to expand the idea of evidence gathering from my life.
183 pieces
Watercolor white pencil on cut out black EVA sheets (approx. 20 x 14 cm, each piece).
Context: These maps were produced in 2001 after a hiatus of 3 years in drawing maps. When I started the 10-Year Performance Project, I decided that I would draw Mental Maps for 10 years (1988-1997) and, at the end of the project, I would never draw Mental Maps again. I struggled for a few years, since it became quite difficult for me to live my life without this reflection of my day. Finally, in 2001, on the second day of July, I finally decided to abandon this conceptual decision and to expand this project until the end of my life.
365 pieces
News media collage, text and drawings on labeled black cards
(21.7 x 16.5 cm, each piece)
Routine: I collected news daily from local, national and international press that did not represent me. After 9/11, and as a response to the US plan to attack Afghanistan, the parents of one of the victims of 9/11 came out on the streets with signs saying “Not in our son’s name”. Following that demonstration, there was a march in New York City where people carried the sign “Not in my Name” and later in London there were marches where people carried the sign “Not in our name”. This work expands on these demonstrations from my personal point of view.
Video
Length: 1 h 02 m 08 s (16:9)
In this Counting Seconds Performance, I sat for one hour in front of the Cinemateca Brasileira, when it was shut down by the government, when there was a threat of fire. (São Paulo, Brazil).
Context: It is with great shock and upset that the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and its 172 Members and Associates around the world heard reports of a fire in one of the warehouses of the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo on 29 July 2021. While we do not know yet the full extent of the damage, it is likely that this latest catastrophe will have once again caused the loss of significant quantities of films and other key cultural artifacts preserved by the Cinemateca Brasileira, one of the oldest and most respected members of our global network and an essential custodian of Brazil’s rich film heritage. It is impossible not to link the various disasters that have caused serious damage to the premises and collections of the Cinemateca Brasileira in the last few years to the glaring lack of financial and institutional support which the Cinemateca has experienced from the Brazilian government in the same period. Last September, the entire staff at the Cinemateca, after not being paid for their work for several months, were all dismissed, and the Cinemateca’s premises are currently closed. FIAF publicly expressed its deep concern at the time, and called on the Brazilian government to help resolve this shocking situation. Unfortunately, very little progress seems to have been made since. The future of the Cinemateca Brasileira remains more uncertain than ever, and each passing day puts its unique collections – already in a shameful state of neglect – increasingly at risk. We once again stand strongly with our colleagues in São Paulo, and urge Brazil’s government to intervene at once to ensure that the Cinemateca Brasileira can start operating again and carrying out its essential cultural missions, as it did so brilliantly for 70 years, before it is too late.
Single piece
Black archival ink gel pen on white paper (35,5 x 28 cm).
Sheet used for the Counting Seconds Performance at the Cinemateca Brasileira on 17/08/2021.
365 pieces
Ballpoint pen on beige aged cardboard shipping labels
(16.0 x 7.8 cm, each piece / 206 x 280 cm, total).
Routine: These maps were registered, every night, on aged manila tags. I decided to draw the map in smaller segments, breaking up the routes I took from one private space to the next.
In May 2005, my mother died and a week later I joined the Agrarian Reform March in Brazil, organized by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and for three weeks these maps covered 210 kilometers, from the city of Goiania to Brasilia. Fifteen thousand landless rural workers participated in the March, sharing these routes with me. I took these manila tags with me during the march and drew the map every night under the light of a torch. In that same year I also traveled to several countries as a Transcommunicator (an interpreter for social movements), as a part of a long term performance where I would be a “mouth and an ear” for others.
Single piece 366 maps, white mercerized cotton thread hand embroidered on black cotton cloth (approx. 210 x 310 cm).
Embroidery of the Continuous Map project from 2016, on a single large cloth. These maps were drawn daily in a small book and later transferred to this black cloth and then embroidered. It took me approximately 2 years to finish embroidering the work.
365 pieces Black ultra-fine rollerball archival ink gel pen on white paper (21 x 14.8 cm, each piece)
Routine: Everyday, I drew a map and transcribed fragments of news into the work. I could no longer separate my Mental Maps and what happened in the world. Whenever there was something in my surroundings that was disturbing or concerning, I included a piece of news as part of the ‘fabric of my day’.
Vídeo
Length: 6 h 36 m 30 s (16:9)
Counting Seconds Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo (MAC-USP) for 7 days, 1 hour per day. I chose a different place in the museum to count seconds for each one of the 7 days. (São Paulo, Brazil).
Single work
White book (21,4 x 26,8 cm), 14 pages, black archival ink gel pen on white paper.
Book used during the performance at MAC-USP (Clareira) in August 2021. I counted seconds for one hour during seven consecutive days (1/8 - 7/8), at different locations at the museum.
Video
Length: 3 h 25 m 18 s (16:9)
Counting Seconds Performance at the “Luta pela Vida” indigenous camp, for 7 hours; in different locations (Brasilia, Brazil).
Context: The most central agenda of the Struggle for Life mobilization is related to the trial by the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF), which is expected to be the most important process of the century for the lives of indigenous peoples. The Court will analyze the repossession action filed by the government of Santa Catarina against the Xokleng people, referring to the Ibirama-Laklãnõ Indigenous Land (TI), where the Guarani and Kaingang peoples also live. Under the status of “general repercussion”, the final decision made by the trial will serve as a guideline for the federal government and all instances of Brazilian justice system, as well as a reference to all processes, administrative procedures and legislative projects regarding the indigenous land demarcation procedures.
7 pieces
White and black archival ink gel pens on white and black paper (28 x 35, 32 x 32, 28, 7 x 42, 32 x 24, 28 x 35, 32 x 24, 24 x 32)
Sheets used during the Luta pela Vida counting seconds performance in Brasilia, during the indigenous camp and protest against the “Marco Temporal” legal thesis. The performance was done on 7 instances and locations, with a different sheet each time where I counted seconds for 1 hour.
Video
Length: 59 m 28 s (16:9)
Counting Seconds Performance by the Brumadinho mudslide mining disaster (Brumadinho, Brazil).
Context: The Brumadinho dam disaster occurred on 25 January 2019 when a tailings dam at the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine suffered a catastrophic failure. The dam, located 9 kilometers (5.6 mi) east of Brumadinho in Minas Gerais, Brazil, is owned by the mining company Vale, which was also involved in the Mariana dam disaster of 2015. The collapse of the dam released a mudflow that engulfed the mine’s headquarters, including a cafeteria during lunchtime, along with houses, farms, inns, and roads downstream. 270 people died as a result of the collapse, of whom 259 were officially confirmed dead, in January 2019, and 11 others were reported as missing. As of January 2022 there were still 6 missing.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. (2024, 4th november). Brumadinho dam disaster. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%20Brumadinho_dam_disaster
2 pieces
Black archival ink gel pen on papel (42 x 29,7 cm each)
Work resulting from my Counting Second performance, during my visit to the Brumadinho disaster, and Mental Map of the day (16/04/2022).
Brumadinho é um Vale de Lágrimas (2021)
Single piece
Black ballpoint archival ink gel pen and liquid white out on white Japanese paper (33,3 x 24,4 cm).
Work reproducing an article about the disaster in Brumadinho, MG, and my map of that day (25/01/2021).
Fomos Expulsos de Nossas Casas (2021)
Single piece
Black ballpoint archival ink gel pen and liquid white out on white Japanese paper (33,3 x 24,4 cm).
Work reproducing an article about the disaster in Mariana, MG, and my map of that day (28/02/2021).
12 pieces
Black archival ink gel pen on white linen/cotton tablecloths
(approx. 140 x 235 cm, each piece).
Routine: For the whole year of 2020, at the end of the day I drew my Mental Map for the day on a white tablecloth divided in 32 rectangles, using in total 12 tablecloths (one for each month of the year). After drawing the map, somedays, I would include disturbing news from my surroundings about the difficulties people were facing to live their lives during the Bolsonaro presidency.
Context: The situation in Brazil throughout 2020, with the pandemic caused by Covid-19 and the authoritarian politics of Jair Bolsonaro, was one of maximum tension. Disinformation campaigns and fake news were a widespread global practice that became normalized during the presidency of Donald Trump in the USA and extended to wide sections of Western countries.
The rise of far-right parties was a direct consequence of authoritarian attitudes that question democratic laws and historically achieved social consensus. In this twelve-panel piece, Ana Amorim picks up on this historical moment through the information published in newspapers, together with her daily routines, like shopping, going to the cinema, strolling or eating in a restaurant. The appearance of the panels is, in the artist’s own words, “fairly feminine and benign”. Each panel, one per each month of the year, is divided into 32 rectangles with its own Mental Map drawn, as usual, at the end of each day. The use of white linen-cotton tablecloths and the fine outline of the maps and the texts offer a subtle, apparently neutral appearance.
However, the information included, especially anything referring to political news from Brazil, turns the piece into a report on a dark time that must be remembered. The contrast between the elegant appearance of the forms and the explicit content included in them turns this piece into a delicate political balance between the domestic and the public.
Single piece
365 maps, white mercerized cotton thread hand embroidered on gray linen-cotton tablecloth
(approx. 145 x 325 cm total)
Routine: In 2021, I decided to embroider my daily Mental Maps on a large gray tablecloth. I drew my maps daily on the tablecloth and began embroidering it. The embroidery work took me almost 3 years to finish.
Counting Time Out Loud (1988)
Video
Length: 10 m 22 s (4:3)
This is an early performance of me attempting to find a way to track time. I counted time out loud, by saying each second of each minute, using a digital clock as a reference of the real time. (Ohio, USA).
Writing Seconds (1988)
Video
Length: 29 m 33 s (4:3)
This is another early performance of me attempting to find a way to track time. I counted time by writing down the seconds of each minute on a notebook, as they passed, using a digital clock as a reference of the real time. (Ohio, USA).
Counting Seconds (1989)
Video
Length: 14 m 14 s (4:3)
In this performance, I defined the format for tracking time, while being present in time, by drawing small dashes for each second that passed. After each minute (60 seconds), I would write down the total number of minutes I had lived until that minute. (Ohio, USA).
Single work
White book (21,4 x 26,8 cm).
13 pages, black archival ink gel pen on paper. The fundamental element of my work is that “I live today”. These Mental Maps were registered for 13 days in Cerezales del Condado, Spain.