Despite the enduring allure of opposites within platonic and Judaeo-Christian intellectual traditions, oppositions in the phenomenological world are illusory. What exists is a continuum of transitions, states and forms in perpetual becoming. One may feel captivated by flickering flames or drifting clouds: both oppressive and soothing, both fascination and fear.
At the outer edges of emotion — where horror and passion meet — we find a cultural construction of opposites. Excessive vision transforms the viewer, producing a somatic mélange of emotions. As bodies change throughout life, so too do the images of the body — images that coexist and diverge. These images never reduce the body to mere flesh, however unavoidable its materiality. As Maria Augusta Babo writes, the body is first and foremost an “anthropomorphization of flesh” (Babo 2004, 25).
As a primordial medium of being-in-the-world, the body may be imagined as imagining itself — its flesh as a symbolic surface, continually re-inscribed by cultural, historical, and affective currents. Only one body is truly impossible: the “natural,” pristine body, conceived as existing outside all others. Even the gaze that seeks it is shaped by cultural codes and beliefs.
The internal vision I first named Charms ignited a voracious drive to produce images and seek meanings. That hyper body, also erotic, carnal and exogenous, demanded realization. I sought to discern an order within the unreason of that vision, and found it in the affective and familiar images I carry — memories inscribed in myself as both cultural and phylogenetic. From this process emerged structuring forms such as the anatomical flayed figure and the armour, but also a space for the formless, manifested in stains and patterns that evoke the morphogenetic logics of the body. I created the costume, and later, variations like Gyu and the LABIOMEP collaboration. These were assembled through affective, anachronistic references — a coherent reinvention through imagined bodies.
Movement triggered all the actions, conceived both as an a priori condition of imagination and as an expressive medium in the image production — whether through the gestural inscription of drawing or the corporeal dynamics performed at LABIOMEP-UP. This understanding of movement aligns both with a phenomenological perspective (Maurice Merleau-Ponti) as with the conception of enaction (Francisco Varela), where perception, imagination, and action are interwoven processes grounded in bodily connaissance, an embodied knowledge that emerges from the sensorimotor engagement between organism and environment.
The use of my own body as an experimental tool proved essential. It enabled a recalibration of subjectivity and embodiment — a displacement of self. Repositioning my proprioception through the imaginative inhabiting of another body was a remarkable experience. Yet despite its subjectivity, the experience acquired form and visibility, rendering it accessible to others. This accessibility is necessarily open, as the coexistence of all video fragments in a multi-channel installation allows for a delirious, inclusive, free-form and complex reading of the images.
To work within the field of art is to engage in a conscious articulation of thought’s specificity: resisting the closure of utility, purpose, or conclusion. My work instead offers itself to be seen, to generate new relations between objects, narratives, and ideas. It aims, in a sense, to be a subversive act of image-making.
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This work was developed within the framework of the practice-based research project Body to Body — imaginary transformations [Corpo a corpo — transformismos imaginários], part of my PhD in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal. This work was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. by project reference 2022.11251.BD and DOI identifier https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.11251.BD.
It is also integrated into the Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS) and partially conducted in collaboration with the biomechanics research lab LABIOMEP from University of Porto.