It’s Natural (and Other Frictions)

Cecilia Carvalhal Braga de Andrade

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.

It's Natural (and Other Frictions)

Cecília Carvalhal

Interdisciplinary PhD Student, University of Maine

University of Maine

Introduction

This artistic research begins from the understanding that Performance Art conceives of the body as a space where social, cultural, and political norms are inscribed, but also as a site of poetic reappropriation, reclaiming what has been historically objectified, silenced, or dominated. In this field, the body asserts itself as a territory between political resistance and embodied poetics, where gesture becomes manifesto, the body becomes material for experimental investigation, and practice becomes a space of rupture, traversing disciplinary boundaries and dissolving the limits between artistic languages.

Inspired by Michel Foucault, who conceives of the body as a surface where forces of discipline and control are inscribed¹, and by Judith Butler, who understands gender not as essence but as a “corporeal style” produced through the repetition of acts that create the illusion of stable identity², this research asks: How can my performance experiments expose the constructedness of gender identity and reveal the bodily constraints imposed by normative power? To pursue this question, I use my body as an artifact to test the tensions between natural and artificial, norm and subversion. Experimenting with oppositional friction between gesture and material, adopting a practice-based artistic research method conducted through cycles of rehearsal, discovery, reflection, and reinscription. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Rebecca Horn, my research reflects on how they conceptualized the body as a support and vehicle of freedom and a poetic and sensorial machine. Ultimately, this work seeks to show how the body, constrained yet inventive, can transform oppression into creation, trauma into creative expression, and thus open new imaginaries of agency.

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