Curated by Eduardo de Jesus
Museu Mineiro
2023

Rosane Dias reflects on the city by pursuing an aesthetic and historical inquiry that is uncommon, transporting us to prehistoric periods through a radical act of fabulation. In the installations Poética das Pedras (2020–2022) and Segredos do Subsolo (2016–2022), Rosane suggests a kind of proximity to the old cabinets of curiosities and archaeological laboratories. The atmosphere evokes, among other references, the cabinet of Professor Lidenbrock from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. The character from the literary classic gathers any trace of past civilizations, such as the old parchment that, once deciphered (to the misfortune of his young assistant Axel), allows him to reach the center of the Earth. Rosane places us in a similar dynamic. The table we see in Segredos do Subsolo calls for a comparable gesture. We must decipher, since the objects we see at first glance evoke fossils, vestiges of other civilizations, precious archaeological remains.

The serialized, organized, and almost categorized manner in which the pieces are displayed—as well as the repetitions, the broken pieces, and the shards with very small fragments that are nonetheless exhibited—seems to guarantee them relevance and prominence. However, when we look more closely at the pieces, shortly after this first impression, we realize that they are replicas of ordinary plastic plates, small disposable containers from industrialized products such as yogurts, among others, which have been molded. The installation is composed of artifacts and fragments made from steel slag and tailings from dam waste, modeled using everyday objects of little value. The work is rich in its multiplicity of meanings, addressing how we deal with what we discard, what remains in the subsoil, the re-signification of residue, and the invention of memory.

The same gesture organizes Poética das Pedras, and once again we see benches with stones carefully arranged by size, color, and shape, forming a sumptuous set of delicate fragments that remind us of flowers, hearts, or butterflies. Delicate and playful, Rosane’s refined poetics of stones invites us to reflect on the potentials of the passages between nature and culture.