Registration Number: 005
Institution: University of São Paulo, Brazil
Abstract: How do performative bodies alter perceptions of the world through cinema in order to activate personal and political change? This film-essay will present a running academic commentary of especially edited excerpts from the feature film Ínsula, made as part of practice-based research at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil from 2017-2021. The presentation will discuss how this film was developed in partnership with a group of 8 women at the ENCOSTA Artist Residency, on Ilha do Mel (Honey Island), steeped within a political scenario that has mobilized hundreds of artists and activists in the movement to “Save Honey Island” from a project to build a new port in its immediate vicinity. In partnership with dozens of NGOs, tourist agencies, and university research agencies, this movement has organized public debates, intervened in governmental actions and produced dozens of videos which feature contributions by some of Brazil’s best-known public figures.
The film is driven by the main issue that oriented the PhD thesis in Media Studies, centered around the challenges of creating audiovisual documentation of contemporary performance art. The ephemeral nature of the body, transformative and immaterial elements generated by presence and ritual, the specificity and nature of site are elements of performance art traditionally deemed to be undocumentable. This practice-based research has led to the formulation of the notion of “cine-performance,” which brings together three normally independent bodies, that together have the creative potential to transform performance art. Central to the construction of this knowledge is the notion of how the body of the performer (body-performer), the body of the filmmaker (cine-performer), and finally the body of an audiovisual work (film-body), intertwine concepts and problems specific to their languages. Cine-Performance creates a knot, a membrane, an experimental artistic device or dispositive, within a set of films that have expounded on experience with documentary filmmaking and performance art.