Juliana Cerqueira | Leite A Potential Space

           

Juliana Cerqueira Leite

A Potential Space

Brooklyn, USA: Small Editions, 2016

84 pp., 5.25 x 7", hardcover

Edition of 75 [+ 8 AP] 

 

An artist book by Brazilian sculptor Juliana Cerqueira Leite featuring laser-cut pages that create a negative space representing the inner topography of a vagina. 

The work is available from the publisher, here, for ten grand. 

"ARTnews: Can you tell me what happened with the casts of vaginas you had started to create?

Juliana Cerqueira Leite: I started to collect a small series of these sculptures and they were really fascinating. You definitely see the same topographies but not necessarily the same volumes. That’s when I started to realize that this wasn’t really a good sculpture project. I started to realize that, first of all, these objects were distortions of what I was trying to depict, and placing a series of these together created a comparative reading that I felt created these ideas of, “This is bigger; this is smaller.” I sat on it for a few years until the idea of turning it into a book came about. I started to think of it more and more, and kind of realized that it was a work of fiction. At that point, I decided this should be a book.

ARTnews: What do you mean when you say “it was a work of fiction”?

Juliana Cerqueira Leite: The object itself is a distortion of what it’s representing because inside of the vagina there is no space. It’s completely closed in on itself. What I find is its best description anatomically is “a potential space,” and that’s actually an anatomical term that’s used to describe parts of the body. It’s essentially a space that exists only in potential in the body and it can be generated and activated. Why these objects are a fiction is that there is no effective way of realistically representing a form that doesn’t occupy space. We can do it through abstraction, we can do it through metaphor, but there’s no direct, representational method for showing something like. So it became clear to me that the only way to represent these was through this lie, through this fiction.

ARTnews: Do you think that calling it fiction can be interpreted incorrectly or be seen as problematic?

Juliana Cerqueira Leite: It’s definitely tricky territory. What I feel is a certain trapped-ness within a system of representation and language that doesn’t accommodate certain things about what the female body should and could and can and shouldn’t and won’t and doesn’t want to or does want to do in the world. By saying it’s a fiction, I want to point the problem out. I don’t want to reproduce the problem, but I am reproducing the problem. How can I represent this when the tools we have are only suitable for things that have a relationship to space that is generative? How can I show it without distorting it? That’s where it becomes a fiction in the sense that I’m forced outside the bounds of what representation can do in order to talk about this at all.

When I talk about it as a fiction, it also has to do with this very direct relationship with the problems of representing the female sex. There’s definitely this repeated art-historical use of the female body as a sounding board for working out problems in how the human being is depicted or thought about. Often that throws the female form into the language of metaphor and the language of fiction, and fails to depict the real female."