Exposition

It’s Natural (and Other Frictions) (2025)

Cecilia Carvalhal Braga de Andrade

About this exposition

This exposition explores how performance-based artistic research can expose the constructedness of gender identity by placing the body in tension with resistant materials and wearable prosthetics. Working with spray foam insulation as both sculptural surface and choreographic partner, I investigated how its artificiality, rigidity, and eventual fracture could function as metaphors for the instability of normative embodiment. What began as a struggle to inhabit a rigid foam body evolved into experiments with prosthetic extensions, where the material was reimagined as a collaborator that displaced gestures, layered images, and generated hybrid presences. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, drag performance practices, Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés, and Rebecca Horn’s prosthetic sculptures, the research stages a dialogue between body, material, and viewer. Documentation through video and photography further expanded the work, creating layered choreographies where prosthetics multiplied into digital traces. In this process, the foam bodies became what Lauren Elkin calls “art monsters”: excessive, disruptive forms that refuse coherence, insisting instead on incompleteness, transformation, and the possibility of imagining bodies otherwise.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsPerformance art, Body as Artifact, Gender Performativity, Friction (Gesture/Material), Wearable sculpture, Foam bodies, Prosthesis, Monster art, Embodiment
date26/09/2025
published30/09/2025
last modified30/09/2025
statuspublished
affiliationUniversity of Maine, Interdisciplinary PhD Program (iPhD)
copyrightCecilia Carvalhal
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3893354/3893355
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3893354
published inResearch Catalogue
external linkhttps://www.ceciliacarvalhal.com/

References

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  • Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993)
  • Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999)
  • Elkin, Lauren, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
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  • Halberstam, Jack, “Rebecca Horn: Of Unicorns and Anarchy”, in Rebecca Horn: Exhibition Catalogue, ed. by Haus der Kunst (Leipzig; Munich: Spector Books, 2024), p. forthcoming catalogue essay
  • Higgins, Dick, “Intermedia”, Leonardo, 1 (MIT Press, 2001), pp. 49–54 <https://doi.org/10.1162/002409401300052718>
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