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From 1986 to 1989, Lenora worked at the “Fol-ha de São Paulo”, a big Brazilian newspaper –first as editor assistant, and afterwards as art editor, leading the graphic renovation of the newspaper. When she left the office in downtown São Paulo to live in Milan – her husband, journalist Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, had been transferred to Italy as a correspondent for “Folha de São Paulo” – she had time to, actually, dive into artistic pro-duction. “That was when it became very clear to me that my universe was not publications, but the space itself ”.

I. The pure wordIn the beginning was the Word. The pure word on

the page. It was the 70’s, and Lenora de Barros spent hours in front of a typewriter waiting for a poem. One of them occurred to her in her sleep. Lenora was a little over 20 years old and, again, spent hours imagining how many poems she could write with the vast alphabet printed on her typewriter keys. It was night when she decided to go to bed, and then, the poem came – not as text, but as image: Lenora imag-ined her tongue running through the typebars.

The following day, her sister Fabiana de Barros, would take the pictures of what would be one of the first visual poems of the artist. The famous photogra-phy series “Poem” from 1979, serves as a metaphor to explain Lenora’s relationship with words – the artist uses them as a visual element (and not just discursive). “I’ve always wanted the word as an instrument, in an atomic form, in a minimal state”, she says. More than 30 years after the “Poem” experience, she has already swallowed, spat and hammered letters. She has paint-ed words on the soles of her feet, on the palms of her hands and on ping pong balls. She has made them jump from the pages, be heard through walls and, in the end, silenced them, chewing on her own tongue.

But in the beginning was the word – and Lenora wrote poems, influenced by the concrete poets that used to go to her house, invited by her father, artist Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998). In 1975, the girl from São Paulo launched her verses on the magazine “Poe-sia em Greve” (“Poetry on Strike”). She also published there one of her best known works, “Homage to George Segal”. In it (a series of photographs, redone as video in the 80’s, under the direction of poet and video-maker friend Walter Silveira). In the video, Lenora brushes her teeth convulsively until she covers her whole head in white toothpaste foam, reminding the pathetic (and white) figures of the installation “Gas Station”, by George Segal, that the artist had seen years before in an exhibition at the São Paulo Biennial.

Although “Poem” and “Homage to George Segal” already announced that Lenora would switch between words and images, the artist’s work spent the 80’s a bit restricted to paper publications. In that decade, se released her first book, “Onde se Vê” (“Where it’s Seen”, 1983), with 12 visual poems and the photography from “Homage to George Segal”. “I participated in exhibitions in the 80’s (the 17th São Paulo Biennial, in 1983, and in the Museum of Image and Sound, also in São Paulo, in 1982), but I thought more of publications. As I came from this path of poets, naturally I was using the same means, which was important, of course, because that was a moment when there weren’t many galleries, and things happened in these experimental magazines”, she recalls.

Profi le: Lenora de Barros*Audrey Furlaneto

Black Magic, circa 1765 - 2013Installation. Wood and granite

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From 1986 to 1989, Lenora worked at the “Fol-ha de São Paulo”, a big Brazilian newspaper –first as editor assistant, and afterwards as art editor, leading the graphic renovation of the newspaper. When she left the office in downtown São Paulo to live in Milan – her husband, journalist Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, had been transferred to Italy as a correspondent for “Folha de São Paulo” – she had time to, actually, dive into artistic pro-duction. “That was when it became very clear to me that my universe was not publications, but the space itself ”.my universe was not publications, but the space itself ”.

I. The pure wordIn the beginning was the Word. The pure word on

the page. It was the 70’s, and Lenora de Barros spent hours in front of a typewriter waiting for a poem. One of them occurred to her in her sleep. Lenora was a little over 20 years old and, again, spent hours imagining how many poems she could write with the vast alphabet printed on her typewriter keys. It was night when she decided to go to bed, and then, the poem came – not as text, but as image: Lenora imag-ined her tongue running through the typebars.

The following day, her sister Fabiana de Barros, would take the pictures of what would be one of the first visual poems of the artist. The famous photogra-phy series “Poem” from 1979, serves as a metaphor to explain Lenora’s relationship with words – the artist uses them as a visual element (and not just discursive). “I’ve always wanted the word as an instrument, in an atomic form, in a minimal state”, she says. More than 30 years after the “Poem” experience, she has already swallowed, spat and hammered letters. She has paint-ed words on the soles of her feet, on the palms of her hands and on ping pong balls. She has made them jump from the pages, be heard through walls and, in the end, silenced them, chewing on her own tongue.

But in the beginning was the word – and Lenora wrote poems, influenced by the concrete poets that used to go to her house, invited by her father, artist Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998). In 1975, the girl from São Paulo launched her verses on the magazine “Poe-sia em Greve” (“Poetry on Strike”). She also published there one of her best known works, “Homage to George Segal”. In it (a series of photographs, redone as video in the 80’s, under the direction of poet and video-maker friend Walter Silveira). In the video, Lenora brushes her teeth convulsively until she covers her whole head in white toothpaste foam, reminding the pathetic (and white) figures of the installation “Gas Station”, by George Segal, that the artist had seen years before in an exhibition at the São Paulo Biennial.

Although “Poem” and “Homage to George Segal” already announced that Lenora would switch between words and images, the artist’s work spent the 80’s a bit restricted to paper publications. In that decade, se released her first book, “Onde se Vê” (“Where it’s Seen”, 1983), with 12 visual poems and the photography from “Homage to George Segal”. “I participated in exhibitions in the 80’s (the 17th São Paulo Biennial, in 1983, and in the Museum of Image and Sound, also in São Paulo, in 1982), but I thought more of publications. As I came from this path of poets, naturally I was using the same means, which was important, of course, because that was a moment when there weren’t many galleries, and things happened in these experimental magazines”, she recalls.

Profi le: Lenora de Barros*Audrey Furlaneto

Black Magic, circa 1765 - 2013Installation. Wood and granite

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associations between her researches and the foreigners’. Sometimes, she would fi ll her space in the newspaper with visual performances in which she herself was the main character – by the way, something that is frequent in her performances, both photographic and video ones.

She pictured herself, for example, with the most diverse hair styles, in the wheat-paste series “Procuro-me” (“Looking for Myself”). She established (silent) dialogues with Yoko Ono or Cindy Sherman – that continued in 2014, in the videos “Jogo de Damas” (“Checkers Game”) and “Em Si as Mesmas” (“In Herself the Same”), where Lenora also plays checkers with herself. “The column really changed my life. It was a kind of studio, where I would retrace some paths and also fi nd new ones”, she recalls. In the follow-ing moment, the word, then, seemed to dematerialize.

II. The word in spaceShortly after landing in Milan, Lenora was faced by

the word in the hands of painters and artists. She saw an ad in the newspaper about an exhibition called “Poesia Vi-siva”, result of the experiments of Italian artists with words. Lenora, then, saw the word get mixed with painting and be converted into object-poem. “All that was very close to what I did. I reheated the machine and restarted my work, already thinking of exhibits, not publications anymore.”

The exhibit came right away, in that same year of 1990, with “Poesia é coisa de nada” (“Poetry is nothing”), her fi rst individual show at Mercato del Sale, in Milan. The artist covered the gallery fl oor with 5,000 ping pong balls, each one with the phrase that names the exhibition. The word, then, jumped from book into space. As Augusto de Campos wrote, her work “expanded from the written visual poetry into the open universe of videoforms, […] the visually intensifi ed word, brought up to the surface, word-body-identifi ed, materi-alized in sensorial biometaphors – face, gesture, light”.

The stay in Milan, although short (not even two years), would be transformative. There, Lenora not only took the word into space, but also worked as a curator, organizing the exhibit “Poesia Concreta in Brasile”, at the Archivio della Grazia di Nuova Scrittura. In her own exhibition, she exploit-ed elements that would be cherished through the following decades, among them the ping pong balls or the idea of silence (a word that, as any other, produces sound and signifi cance).

About the balls – or “ping poems”, as the artist named them –, they were included defi nitely into her work, reappear-ing in her trajectory in a game of coming and going that mimics ping pong itself. Upon her return to Brazil, in 1990, the balls came back to her studio and, in 1994, 10 thousand of them featured in the installation “Ácida Cidade” (“Acid City”), in the collective “Arte Cidade” in São Paulo. Later, in 2001, they took over the artist’s fi rst individual in Brazil, “O que que há de novo, de novo, pussyquete?” (“What’s up, again, pussycat?”), in Gal-lery Millan. In this case, they were stuck to ping pong paddles or in boxes, printed with the words “take me” or “weigh me”.

“I started to notice that this ball could be a support and that, according to the text it received, it would have another meaning and would be in another context. I exploit this until I get to the individual at the Gallery Millan, in 2001. That’s when I had the perception that this repetition happened in other works. And maybe this happens because I like dealing with the change of context, see how the thing changes, how it reveals itself in diff erent forms. I like to see something getting a diff erent meaning when the context is changed”, she explains.

In this sense, it was crucial for the artist to be able to investigate her own archive, make connections and estab-lish kinds of ping pong matches with other artists – some-thing that was granted to her by the column “…umas” (“…some”), that she wrote for “Jornal da Tarde” between 1993 and 1996. In her weekly space, Lenora invented many dialogues with distant artists, in a pre-Google era, tracing

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associations between her researches and the foreigners’. Sometimes, she would fi ll her space in the newspaper with visual performances in which she herself was the main character – by the way, something that is frequent in her performances, both photographic and video ones.

She pictured herself, for example, with the most diverse hair styles, in the wheat-paste series “Procuro-me” (“Looking for Myself”). She established (silent) dialogues with Yoko Ono or Cindy Sherman – that continued in 2014, in the videos “Jogo de Damas” (“Checkers Game”) and “Em Si as Mesmas” (“In Herself the Same”), where Lenora also plays checkers with herself. “The column really changed my life. It was a kind of studio, where I would retrace some paths and also fi nd new ones”, she recalls. In the follow-ing moment, the word, then, seemed to dematerialize.

II. The word in spaceShortly after landing in Milan, Lenora was faced by

the word in the hands of painters and artists. She saw an ad in the newspaper about an exhibition called “Poesia Vi-siva”, result of the experiments of Italian artists with words. Lenora, then, saw the word get mixed with painting and be converted into object-poem. “All that was very close to what I did. I reheated the machine and restarted my work, already thinking of exhibits, not publications anymore.”

The exhibit came right away, in that same year of 1990, with “Poesia é coisa de nada” (“Poetry is nothing”), her fi rst individual show at Mercato del Sale, in Milan. The artist covered the gallery fl oor with 5,000 ping pong balls, each one with the phrase that names the exhibition. The word, then, jumped from book into space. As Augusto de Campos wrote, her work “expanded from the written visual poetry into the open universe of videoforms, […] the visually intensifi ed word, brought up to the surface, word-body-identifi ed, materi-alized in sensorial biometaphors – face, gesture, light”.

The stay in Milan, although short (not even two years), would be transformative. There, Lenora not only took the word into space, but also worked as a curator, organizing the exhibit “Poesia Concreta in Brasile”, at the Archivio della Grazia di Nuova Scrittura. In her own exhibition, she exploit-ed elements that would be cherished through the following decades, among them the ping pong balls or the idea of silence (a word that, as any other, produces sound and signifi cance).

About the balls – or “ping poems”, as the artist named them –, they were included defi nitely into her work, reappear-ing in her trajectory in a game of coming and going that mimics ping pong itself. Upon her return to Brazil, in 1990, the balls came back to her studio and, in 1994, 10 thousand of them featured in the installation “Ácida Cidade” (“Acid City”), in the collective “Arte Cidade” in São Paulo. Later, in 2001, they took over the artist’s fi rst individual in Brazil, “O que que há de novo, de novo, pussyquete?” (“What’s up, again, pussycat?”), in Gal-lery Millan. In this case, they were stuck to ping pong paddles or in boxes, printed with the words “take me” or “weigh me”.

“I started to notice that this ball could be a support and that, according to the text it received, it would have another meaning and would be in another context. I exploit this until I get to the individual at the Gallery Millan, in 2001. That’s when I had the perception that this repetition happened in other works. And maybe this happens because I like dealing with the change of context, see how the thing changes, how it reveals itself in diff erent forms. I like to see something getting a diff erent meaning when the context is changed”, she explains.

In this sense, it was crucial for the artist to be able to investigate her own archive, make connections and estab-lish kinds of ping pong matches with other artists – some-thing that was granted to her by the column “…umas” (“…some”), that she wrote for “Jornal da Tarde” between 1993 and 1996. In her weekly space, Lenora invented many dialogues with distant artists, in a pre-Google era, tracing

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fectionately calls “a partner look”. In the series, she mixes performances and poems, like in “Tato no Olho” (“Touch in the Eye”), where she covers the eyes with a coming and going of hands towards the face. The gestures, quite violent, are followed by the poem: “A mão que tapa o tato do olho não vê que olho não vive sem toque” (“The hand that covers the touch of the eye doesn’t see that eye doesn’t live without touch”).

Also from the 2000’s are the photographs that make one of her most emblematic works, “Procuro-me”. The work was born in 1994 in a shopping mall in São Paulo, where the artist pictured herself using software that allowed her to “wear” different wigs. At the time, she published the result in her column “…umas”. Later, in 2001, right after 9/11, when she saw President Bush say on television that the culprits for the attack were “wanted – dead or alive”, she went back to self-portraits. She had the idea of using them for the series “Procu-ro-me” and used the phrase as a title for police-like posters with her face printed on them. Exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo, the works gained visi-bility and were even vandalized by an art group that claimed for “artistic purity” and other delusions.

But maybe the word has actually lost its body in “Sonoplastia” (“Sonoplasty”), exhibition of 2001, in Gallery Millan. Then, the artist invited the public to put a

glass (and an ear) against the gallery wall, as if to listen to the neighbor’s conversation. About the exposition, critic Luisa Duarte wrote: “Note that they are bodiless words. If poetry and performance have been part of the artist’s poetic repertoire for some time, the thought of radio over the last few years has entered her works and we can see in this exhibition the consequence of the entry of this new tenant. (…) Nothing is shown to us and thus we are invited to imagine, in the strong sense of the term.” Lenora also saw there a “bodiless voice”. “This has always seemed a fascinating theme to me, that accompanies me since I cre-ated Radiovisual, for the 7th Mercosul Biennial in 2009. Voices that are almost embodied and that have a pres-ence as big as that of a person in front of you”, she says.

Now completely bodiless – though not absent – Lenora’s word inspired an exposition in New York, where the artist lived for a little over a year. “Ultrapassado”, title of a work Lenora presented in São Paulo in the 2000’s, intrigued the owner of the gallery Broadway 1602, the German Anke Kempes. The word has various possible meanings (from exceed or transcend to overcome or leave behind as something from the past). In the exhibition, Lenora showed a chair with rearview mirrors where the visitors could sit, but back to back, so they couldn’t see each other. In all, ten artists (four Brazilian), all somehow influenced by constructivism, exposed their works at the

III. The bodiless wordIn 1998, Lenora took her tongue to the São Paulo Bi-

ennial, also known as the Anthropophagy Biennial. In that 24th edition of the exhibit, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, the artist exposed the photograph “Língua vertebral” (“Vertebral Tongue”), where a tiny spine lays (like a jewel) on her exposed tongue (as if in a scream). Or even the video “No país da língua grande, dai carne a quem quer carne” (“In the big tongue country, give meat to those who want meat”), where she chewed her own tongue, without saying anything – or just in an apparent silence.

“Inside my universe, I see very clearly a situation discussed by John Cage, of saying without saying. From the beginning of my work, this is present, this situation of denial, of nothing, of silence. Since I was very young, I’ve been intrigued by the sentence: ‘I said nothing’. If you said nothing, you said the word nothing, right? This has always intrigued me.” This is how, even dematerialized (or not used directly as visual source of the work), the word, in Lenora’s tongue, still has something to say.

The videos produced for the Mercosul Biennial, in 2005, account for this silence full of significance, and therefore, of word. Lenora named the series “Não quero nem ver” (“I don’t even want to see”) and, for the first time, took part in the editing of the videos, side by side with Luciano Mariussi, whom she af-

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fectionately calls “a partner look”. In the series, she mixes performances and poems, like in “Tato no Olho” (“Touch in the Eye”), where she covers the eyes with a coming and going of hands towards the face. The gestures, quite violent, are followed by the poem: “A mão que tapa o tato do olho não vê que olho não vive sem toque” (“The hand that covers the touch of the eye doesn’t see that eye doesn’t live without touch”).

Also from the 2000’s are the photographs that make one of her most emblematic works, “Procuro-me”. The work was born in 1994 in a shopping mall in São Paulo, where the artist pictured herself using software that allowed her to “wear” different wigs. At the time, she published the result in her column “…umas”. Later, in 2001, right after 9/11, when she saw President Bush say on television that the culprits for the attack were “wanted – dead or alive”, she went back to self-portraits. She had the idea of using them for the series “Procu-ro-me” and used the phrase as a title for police-like posters with her face printed on them. Exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo, the works gained visi-bility and were even vandalized by an art group that claimed for “artistic purity” and other delusions.

But maybe the word has actually lost its body in “Sonoplastia” (“Sonoplasty”), exhibition of 2001, in Gallery Millan. Then, the artist invited the public to put a

glass (and an ear) against the gallery wall, as if to listen to the neighbor’s conversation. About the exposition, critic Luisa Duarte wrote: “Note that they are bodiless words. If poetry and performance have been part of the artist’s poetic repertoire for some time, the thought of radio over the last few years has entered her works and we can see in this exhibition the consequence of the entry of this new tenant. (…) Nothing is shown to us and thus we are invited to imagine, in the strong sense of the term.” Lenora also saw there a “bodiless voice”. “This has always seemed a fascinating theme to me, that accompanies me since I cre-ated Radiovisual, for the 7th Mercosul Biennial in 2009. Voices that are almost embodied and that have a pres-ence as big as that of a person in front of you”, she says.

Now completely bodiless – though not absent – Lenora’s word inspired an exposition in New York, where the artist lived for a little over a year. “Ultrapassado”, title of a work Lenora presented in São Paulo in the 2000’s, intrigued the owner of the gallery Broadway 1602, the German Anke Kempes. The word has various possible meanings (from exceed or transcend to overcome or leave behind as something from the past). In the exhibition, Lenora showed a chair with rearview mirrors where the visitors could sit, but back to back, so they couldn’t see each other. In all, ten artists (four Brazilian), all somehow influenced by constructivism, exposed their works at the

III. The bodiless wordIn 1998, Lenora took her tongue to the São Paulo Bi-

ennial, also known as the Anthropophagy Biennial. In that 24th edition of the exhibit, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, the artist exposed the photograph “Língua vertebral” (“Vertebral Tongue”), where a tiny spine lays (like a jewel) on her exposed tongue (as if in a scream). Or even the video “No país da língua grande, dai carne a quem quer carne” (“In the big tongue country, give meat to those who want meat”), where she chewed her own tongue, without saying anything – or just in an apparent silence.

“Inside my universe, I see very clearly a situation discussed by John Cage, of saying without saying. From the beginning of my work, this is present, this situation of denial, of nothing, of silence. Since I was very young, I’ve been intrigued by the sentence: ‘I said nothing’. If you said nothing, you said the word nothing, right? This has always intrigued me.” This is how, even dematerialized (or not used directly as visual source of the work), the word, in Lenora’s tongue, still has something to say.

The videos produced for the Mercosul Biennial, in 2005, account for this silence full of significance, and therefore, of word. Lenora named the series “Não quero nem ver” (“I don’t even want to see”) and, for the first time, took part in the editing of the videos, side by side with Luciano Mariussi, whom she af-

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