It's Natural (and Other Frictions)
Cecília Carvalhal
Interdisciplinary PhD Student, University of Maine
University of Maine
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.