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.

Footnotes:

¹ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 136.

² Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 179.

³Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 187.

⁴Guy Brett, ‘The Experimental Exercise of Liberty’, in Hélio Oiticica, ed. by Guy Brett, Catherine Lampert, and Luciano Figueiredo (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1993), p. 65.

⁵Ibid., p. 140.

⁶Judith Butler develops the idea that gender is produced through repetition in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 175-80, and extends it in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 15, where she emphasizes how norms materialize on the body through reiterative practices.

⁷Paula Braga, ‘Hélio Oiticica and the Parangolés: (Ad)Dressing Nietzsche’s Übermensch’, Third Text, 17.1 (2003), 43–52 (p. 50).

⁸Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 13.

⁹Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, Leonardo, 34.1 (2001), 49–54 (first publ. 1966).

¹⁰Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012).

¹¹Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Lauren Elkin, esp. on monstrous aesthetics and feminist legibility.

Tip

Tip