Fotografia Performática

Abstract

This thesis is an approach towards thinking photography as performative. Although this concept not been defined yet, it is possible to identify certain aspects in some of the works of Eugène Atget, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp and Gordon Matta-Clark that lead to name it that way. Trying to outline the notion of performative photography as well as some considerations on the works of those artists based on that concept, allowed inquiring issues such as the confront between the continuity of perception and the multiplicity of a non-synthetic vision, the impossibility of memory to complete mentally that which does not present itself as visible unless having recurring to similar objects, the inadequacy we feel facing unknown situations and the non-satisfaction of our visual habits. Photography as an act, as a concrete activity, involves taking a position and interfering in reality, affecting several levels of human experience. An action driven by the work itself and intrinsic to an esthetic reality, that questions convictions, dissolves previous ideas and demands deeper levels of perception. Although it forces us to face some challenges, it also enables us to bestow plasticity to photographic images, thus removing their fixed condition