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Ciclotramas
The work of Janaina Mello Landini is divided into several series, each exploring a distinct facet of networks, time, and materiality. From the iconic Ciclotrama unravelings to site-specific interventions, each series builds its own visual vocabulary while remaining connected to a deeper inquiry into the architectures that shape our world.
Ciclotrama
and its unfoldings
Born in the interior of Minas Gerais, in a small town where time was measured by domestic gatherings and manual practices, Janaina grew up among threads, fabrics, and embroidery. Before becoming language, thread was habit, environment, everyday life. That inaugural gesture remains as an embodied memory — one that would later be reconfigured by architecture, mathematics, and philosophy.
Her training and practice as an architect consolidated the structural dimension of her thinking. Calculus, in turn, opened up the experience of the infinite — not as a distant abstraction, but as a concrete operation: dividing, recomposing, projecting beyond the visible.
Her encounter with Deleuze and other thinkers shifted her gaze toward continuous fields, with no centre, where multiplicity precedes any unity.
It is at this crossroads of manual gesture, mathematical thought, and philosophical intuition that the conceptual foundation of her work emerges: an investigation into the relationship between the one and the whole, between the singular and what exists only as a network.
The thread as a unit
The thread comes to be understood as a singular element that simultaneously belongs to a larger system. From it, complexity can be constructed — not through arbitrary accumulation, but through unfolding.
Ciclotrama: a language of infinity
It is from this need for flow that the concept of Ciclotrama arises — a term coined by the artist to designate a cyclical weave that tends toward infinity.
Inspired by Benoît Mandelbrot, the principle is simple: to apply a repetition algorithm to threads. Initially, binary bifurcation — dividing into two, and again into two — organizes the expansion of a form that grows as it advances. This process echoes recurring patterns in nature's fluid dynamics: tree branches, vascular systems, river courses.
More recently, the artist has incorporated a subtraction algorithm (-1), in which the structure loses one thread at a time, introducing a different logic. Instead of expanding, the arms taper as they advance.
Here, however, the algorithm is not merely an abstract model: it is tensioned by matter. Each deviation — tension, torsion, traction, weight, time, and transformation — ceases to be external and becomes part of the system itself, interfering with the result and ensuring that repetition is never identical to itself. The structure tends toward infinity, yet always manifests within the field of variation.
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