Mimoso
Frames from videoperformance (video projection on three walls), 2014.05:16 minutes
Mounted in Desterro exhibition at MAMAM – Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães, Recife, 2014.
Mimoso, 2014
Juliana Notari (Pernambuco, Brazil)
Video performance, 4’44’’
This work was carried out on Marajó Island together with buffalo Mimoso. The action is part of the research the artist has been developing on the presence of the female body in opposition to a society that prides itself on virility and phallocentrism. The artist was tied to the animal and let herself be dragged through the sand of the beach of the Marajó archipelago, knowing that after the action the buffalo would be castrated. She then incorporates the animal’s castration into the work by eating its raw testicle in the same setting of this unique landscape. It’s like a trance provoked by the context, embodying the virility that was torn from the animal, in an act that is more cannibalistic than pious, of perpetuating the animal’s libidinal energy. In this way, the artist dislocates the brutal practice of castration, which is carried out on the island on a daily basis, to an artistic gesture that highlights the violence between different modes of existing.