Fábricas de ter sido: produção de presença impura

Abstract

This thesis consists of reflections on both the artistic research and the creative process of Fábricas de Ter Sido developed during the four year doctoral programme. Commencing from the conception of body that appears in this work, I discuss the presence of the performative body. The body in Fábricas de Ter Sido appears populated by ghosts of a heterogeneous network of female voices - tatters of family memories, the history of psychoanalysis and fictions and myths created. Engaging with the notions of place of origin, memory and narrative, the past emerges in Fábricas de Ter Sido, disarticulating the body s actuality, shifting thinking from the specificity of performance as an ephemeral event that does not remain. The mestizo Papagoiaba s corporeal time occurs in the impermanence of losses in the present, but appears in the marks left by the circulation of the remains that survive in the body. Performance is not thought of as pure impermanence, nor does it return to the practice of representing the past. It refuses the logic of the archive. Female figures, real and fictional, emerge in the body in performance. That which has been buried returns and the resistance of silenced voices reveals the vital power of survival that can t be forgotten. If for psychoanalysis the image of death should be erased and replaced by a chronological narrative order, in Fábricas de Ter Sido, to re-move means to set that which is immobilized into motion again. The presence of the body in performance becomes, in this work, an impure presence constituting images that do not refuse memory