(Neo)cartographies of an Insular Landscape
Por Liannys Lisset Peña Rodríguez
The island hesitates, defines itself again, hesitates again (…) The wave displaces every attempt at definition, every word (…) They are pieces of us that return, insist, perpetuate the cycle1 (…) Rufo Caballero would say before the insular landscapes of Jany Batista.
The island as an archetype flows in her imaginary. It is suggested from an economy of visual resources; whose rhetoric disturbs the viewer. To allude to it is to think of Virgilio and the (im)pertinence of the waters. Rufo cites it as (…) the document of our bodies2. In El siglo de las luces, Carpentier states: it is the confinement of living in a land without roads to other lands. For Jany Batista it is, simply, that mocked and fragmented memory, which she decides to capture as a kind of (neo)cartography of an insular landscape.
Images establish that Barthean punctum that affects and mobilizes us. They sustain form-content relations in the symbolic; and make the scene subject to innumerable variations; situating it in the link with the extra-imaginal. Everything is suggested; to propitiate a simultaneity between absence-presence: because if it is true that something is not there, its implicit appearance is not necessary to signify.
Broken and cut into pieces you cease to be the Pangea you were and I recompose you at my whim (…) you cease to be who you were to be the possibility in a million3. In this proposal, Batista dissects the preconditioned elements (maps) and establishes a poetics that introduces the equivocal, the penumbra. They are preformed fragments, extracted from pre-existing messages or texts, and he juxtaposes them to integrate them into a set of composite and antagonistic contextuality.
The utopian allows Batista to model his archetype of the island; a defenseless portion of land at the mercy of the waters; that outopos, “place that does not exist”, or “good place”. She reformulates the subjectivity of the territorial concept by questioning the real condition of “land that the feet walk on”.She represents geographic zones from a type of antimap; as a challenge to the worn out imaginal prototype, which supposes this significance from the traditional. They are critical narratives that desacralize and dismantle the already commercialized myth of the insular concept.
In front of her works I imagine her in the process of mapping. By tearing, cutting, repositioning the pieces like a puzzle, she shapes, from a cynical vision, her ideal geopolitical space. She privileges the manual, because each one is an “intimate” reinterpretation of the insular, and all the (in)definitions it entails.
Dealing with semantics (legends) is an indispensable element of cartographic language. A process of visual suppression operates in the works: the textual suggestion is associated to what is represented in images of infinite conceptual nature, which demand to be seen from a distance, calm and thoroughness; like a geographer, who interrogates each map and demands to decipher the deception of appearances.
Bojeo alludes to search and discovery; it puts into practice what its etymological nature argues. Batista explores, traces lines, searches in every geographical feature, the possibility of new landscapes. Her images present an ellipsis by suppression: through the chromatic as the dominant element, he projects a subjective landscape, conditioned by the annexed textual information. Both guarantee the substitution of contents, not visually available; but that the spectator, in the process of investigation, in front of the image, is invited to complete. The artist admits that her intention is to establish a complicity with the observer, to favor interaction and play.
Nanay is pain in Quechua. The word is justification to represent as a calligraphy the limit of the Latin American coasts. A heartbeat or stroke is enough to summarize this memory of resistance. By outlining them, dyeing them in red, he metaphorizes utopia, that which, for Camnitzer, seeks perfection, like a mirage. Minimalism in the scene sustains a symbolic permutation: it conditions the vision to infinite variations, and generates complex form-content relationships. A silent work that activates on the surface a wide field of interpretations; because Nanay, also, is a river, which together with two others, transforms the Peruvian city of Iquitos, into an island. There they are unconsciously, those spaces of loneliness persistent as a myth.
For Jany Batista, to represent is to leave the comfort zone, to go against the current, to desacralize the inherited imaginary. Everything from the activation of imagino-textual components; that even in absentia, exist. Her images need to (de)construct themselves from their traditional condition (Pangea); insinuate themselves as a subjective landscape (Bojeo) or create, through poetry (Nanay) a type of graphology that cannot be separated from its territorial connection.
Jany Batista critically questions herself about this (un)possible landscape that represents successive absences and uncertainties. Artistic cartography is an ironic representation of her thoughts (…) It is about making art an aesthetic experience beyond an object of contemplation, by facilitating the crossing of ideas and shared opinions4 (…) Returning to the maps is the pretext, to fabricate her utopia as that representation of the we that for Batista is nothing more than (…) an uncompromising self, our possession of memory.5
1 Caballero, Rufo: “Cuban Art, 1981 M-2007: Tell me what offends you most” in Lenguaje Sucio. Critical narratives on Cuban art. Vol. II Editorial Hipermedia 2019 p.59.
2 Ibidem.
3 Batista, Jany: White Nights. Diploma work. Faculty of Visual Arts. University of the Arts (ISA) 2024 p.99.
4 Ibidem p.62.
5 Ibidem.


