10th PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION
2023
Affections for/of Pussy* Masculinities or SELF-LOVE (2024)
Taliboy (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UERJ)
To talk about this urban intervention series, “Affectivities to/of Pussey Masculinities or SELF-LOVE” is to talk about my action in the world and how it is not dissociated from my way of foreseeing and receiving this world! That is, its violence and emotional outbursts!!! More than 15 years ago, I decided to respond to these outbursts to try to name or get closer to the damage that strongly afflicted me – the OPPRESSIONS!!! Since then, it has been a long journey, I got involved with social movements, mainly Feminism and its different lines, and got closer to the visual arts and the opportunity to giving the work a title. This was certainly what I found most liberating, I knew that from this junction I could reach that lump stuck in my throat. And so, I built an urban visual practice that allows me to rework the violent and affective chaos that so strongly impacts me, collectively, the questions/dilemmas of identities and of the political struggle ‘between’ their affirmations and subversions. I ❤️ TALIBOY, is another BOY of Pussy Masculinities who wonders if THERE IS PAX IN PALESTINE – because if there is no PAXXLESTINA, there cannot be PAXX anywhere!!!
AutopARTs Disability (2024)
Juliana Cavalcante Marinho Paiva (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC)
This essay is autobiographical, composed of self-portraits of a woman with a physical disability. The photographs relate to the theme of disability and permeate the history of an appropriation of the political subject. Specifically, the change in status from just being descriptively a person with disability, to being politically a woman with disability, as advocated by the author Mia Mingus.
The photo essay tells the story of a woman with disability who, like other women with disabilities, receives negative social stigmas that cut and pierce her body and self-esteem. She tries to adapt to the norm by patching up her own body. Through feminist readings, disability studies and activism, she comes to understand herself as Defiça, a term used by Brazilian disability activists to talk about themselves. A Defiça (disabled) woman, who has sexuality and knows it, in contrast to the supposed asexuality of a socially diffused disability. A woman who is interdependent on people and assistive technologies such as orthotics, not with a compulsory use, but with the possibility for choice and self-determination of how to live her life.
Corpo-inço [Body-weed]: Resistance and Metamorphosis through a Photographic Self-portrait (2021-2023)
Audrian Vinicius Cassanelli Griss (Prefeitura de Chapecó)
This work has its roots in my origin in the countryside and is based on the observation of weeds found in the surroundings of monoculture plantations in the municipality of Xanxerê, SC. The weeds resist and adapt to conditions hostile to life and have a confluence with my existence that is different from others and in which my body is seen as a weed. Thus, Body-weed is a body thought of through art in a poetics that seeks to verify possible relations between weeds with the artist’s body that, unwanted in its environment, resists. I use digital photography to make self-portraits in which I see myself hybridized as an other. Reality is intertwined with the artist’s imagination in the series realized in this poetic research. Current technology facilitates assimilations and crossings that change the paradigms of contemporary photography and submit us to the effects of technology, making us hybrids in the use of technological devices. In my art work, this relationship with technology allows establishing a work where the hybridized body evokes resistance to neglect, to prejudice, daring to be different, to be LGBTQIAP+ in the rural portion of a conservative state.
Water Bodies (2023)
Débora Klempous Corrêa (Universidade de São Paulo – USP)
As beings composed mostly of water, all of us, humans and non-humans – aquatic bodies more-than-humans – we carry the capacity to nourish and proliferate life from our oceanic flesh. All bodies of water owe their existence to gestation in an aquatic environment. Yet, in the human experience, this gestational way of being continues to be linked to the figure of a woman, within a biologically essentialist and heteronormative framework, and according to a binary opposition that renders nature as passive.
We are constantly immersed in watery environments, even the ground and air – saturated with humidity – are not simply backdrops for the supposedly masculine act of tearing with violent and long strokes, because there is no below, there is no above. The environment is not separated from the entities that inhabit it, it is not a passive background to which bodies, houses, shells, and beliefs can be hooked: It’s a boat that, unmoored, sinks.
After Midnight (2024)
Leani Jaline Ferrari Ferreira (Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP)
“After midnight” is a photographic series that seeks to explore the nuances of today’s youth at night, mainly at parties and concerts. Textures, colors and photographic techniques are investigated to highlight the identity of young people inserted in the environment and construct a powerful aesthetic universe. Searching less than clear images, with fewer pixels, and more noisie from this photographic device, the objects become denser in layers by using technology: long exposure, exploration of colors, and the story told in each frame. The work discusses a look at the identity of these bodies and their existence across the photographic surface individually, and as a whole, in the photographic series. The photos intersection communication with medias, and materialize future existences of these bodies that talk to others in the university environment in their own experiences and existence. Youth and their experiences are seen in plural, in environments where they can be themselves, with freedom and plurality. The work thus discusses not only the device, but a future and aesthetic universe of who we are today and who we will be in the future.
Slave Anaesthe[se~thi]c: free! (2023)
Ariska Derìì da Costa Lopes (Universidade Federal do Amazonas – UFAM)
This reinterpretation is a manifesto against silencing, gagging. The body on display, even silent and tied up, expresses the use of aesthetics as ammunition within strategies to transfabulate the coming, the turns and the enchanted life of a travesty body. Through the image of Anastácia we declare ourselves free to scream, not just through our mouths, but with our whole body. It is an aesthetic commitment to ancestral recovery; against the static imposed by the anesthesias and euthanasias with which the world-CIStem insists on forging its necropolitics.
Fat & Dyke (2020-2023)
Paula Silva de Moraes Mello ( SENAC SP)
Body. Fat. Dissident. Abject.
Living as a fat dyke, in a sexist and heteronormative society, has daily implications. The feelings go beyond medical fatphobia, structural exclusion (how many times do we ask ourselves if we will fit in a chair?), considering that even the LGBTQIA+ movement excludes dissident bodies, creates categories for gay and fat men – bears – but fat and sapphic women, who are they? Fetishization brings the standardization of how the female body should be. How to be a body that generates disgust?
The paste-up “Fat and Dyke” features a self-portrait of the author, highlighting her non-normative body, printed and pasted on walls in the cities of Marília and São Paulo, accompanied by the trigger phrase “Gorda & Sapatão” [Fat and Dyke]. The first intervention was shot in the morning after the pasting. The second, a week later. The photos of the “interaction” present the repulsion expressed. Overnight, from one week to the next, the violence expands and removes a fat and dissident body from sight. No one could bear to see and deal with this identity exposed on the street. The sequence of photographs brings us closer and closer, magnifying the discomfort that a body/identity causes by simply existing.
Las Crudas [The raw ones]: black girls becoming black women in Brazil and Cuba (2021)
Antonia Gabriela Pereira de Araujo (Harvard University)
This visual show investigates how martial arts mediate the production of a way of being, living. It relates to the world in which Black Cuban and Brazilian girls use a bodily resource called “creating strengths”. Creating strength is also a technical resource developed by martial arts competitors to live in contexts of extreme inequalities, violence, trauma and pain resulting from racial structures. The images in this visual editorial record girls becoming Black women in two ethnographic contexts, one in the Comunidade da Maré neighborhood ( Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and the other in San Miguel de Padrón (Havana, Cuba). The exhibit brings visual materials from everyday situations that involve ways of producing “raw bodies” in solares, backyards, houses, streets, gyms and’ boxing gyms. The project uses a counterpoint between images, texts and ethnographic contexts to show how everyday experiences of “confrontment”, “resistance” and “overcoming” caused by tensions from structures of gender, class, territory, generation and “race” shape bodies and subjectivities, structure meanings and describe desires.
Tongue of Fire (2022-2024)
Monique Burigo Marin (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina – UDESC)
“Tongue of Fire” is a study in the archives of a family memory, which includes a photographic series, videos, and interviews about the memories of the women in my family. Like a conversation around a fire, we evoke times past, remember those who are no longer with us, and reflect together on past and present female roles, as well as possible futures.
In these conversations, both joyful and sad narratives emerge, often with a direct connection to tongues and fire: “After I got married, I faded away. I no longer had the desire to speak… I ruined my life.” In a quest to reignite what was extinguished and in an attempt to cauterize the wounds touched upon during these conversations, collective photo performances are carried out in which there is room for silence and for expressing, with the body, what cannot be said with words.
During a doctoral research period in Italy, between September 2023 and May 2024, I carried out this project in the cemeteries of the cities where my ancestors come from: Soverzene and Cesiomaggiore. In Bologna, the city where I was living, I had participation from Brazilian friends who, in those distant lands, became my family.
University Mothers (2024)
Luz Mariana Blet (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC)
Motherhood is a category made quite invisible at universities. But is it possible to say that motherhood is a category? Or would it be better to speak of motherhoods – which are diverse and plural and do not necessarily fit a pattern. This had not been a research topic for me. Until I returned to university as a mother, and motherhood began to exert a significant influence on my academic life (and that of others).
Despite their different experiences, some things are common to the lives of university mothers, such as the lack of a minimally welcoming physical space for their children; the looks and at times derogatory words from colleagues or professors; the failure to realize that vacation is not synonymous with productivity; or the impossibility of understanding that working at home is not the same for everyone, because not all homes are equal…
This photo shoot aims to give visibility to university mothers. Several mothers accepted the proposal to receive me in their homes and represent, based on the reality of daily life, an answer to my question: “And if you had to study now, what would it be like?”. At times, reality also took the place of representation.
Making of Silver Fever: women and gender dissidence behind the camera (2024)
Camila da Silva Marques (Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana – UNILA)
Silver Fever is an action of the extension project LAB&ART: Studies and experiments in Art Direction of the Cinema and Audiovisual course at UNILA, where 25 students (re)create costumes, sets, objects and characterization by reusing damaged products, to document work processes in a photographic editorial and an audiovisual documentary. Among the executors of the project, coordinated by professor Camila Marques, are 25 students, 20 of whom are women (cis and trans, white, black, Latin American and South African) and 5 people from the LGBTQIAP+ community. The objective of this exhibition, entitled Making of Silver Fever: women and gender dissidence behind the cameras, is to reveal gender issues in the audiovisual production sector: an industry that is among those with the lowest gender and color parity. Several market and academic surveys demonstrate the dominance of white men in the main leadership and technical roles, such as direction, production, direction of photography, editing and even art direction. Our objective is to show female protagonism and gender dissidence behind the cameras and women as protagonists in the telling of audiovisual stories.
Witchcraft Manifesto: The Night of Caiporas (2023)
Marina Fernandez da Cunha (Universidade Federal da Bahia – UFBA)
These photos register the Salvador club party “Manifesto” which, on October 14, 2023, presented the edition “Manifesto Bruxaria: A Noite das Caiporas”, paying homage to Brazilian culture and celebrating dissident lives. There were sets by Grace Kelly, BADSISTA, Disfalq, Karmaleoa and Kay Okan. There were also artistic performances by Spadina Banks, Barbie Quebra Nozes, Towanda Verde Frita, Verenna and Gana.
Margaridas Maranhenses (2023)
Alice Vieira Lima Cavalcante (Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro – UFRRJ)
This series documents women from the Maranhão delegation at the 2023 Marcha das Margaridas [a protest march organized by women farmworkers]. The documentation stemmed from what I call a field of encounters, executed from the trajectory of master’s research shared with many women, in such a way that the process became a space permeated by relationships of affection and trust. Photographing the moment of the march’s 7th edition, the largest women’s action in Latin America, was an opportunity to closely observe the delegation of Maranhão women who paved the way for those from other states to cross the Eixo Monumental, [the central avenue] in Brasília. Rural women, quilombolas, family farmers, union leaders – in short, political women engaged in movements to defend their rights participated. Believing that the language of photography can complement academic research, I am grateful for the generosity and trust of all who opened themselves up to my notes and lenses on this journey. In each of their gazes, one can see the living legacy of Margarida Maria Alves, to whom I dedicate these photographs.
Marked on the Skin (2021)
Bruna Abreu dos Reis (Instituto Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
“Marked on the Skin” is a project that comprises the creation of a photo essay and an experimental video, inspired by the photo essay “Feito Tatuagem” by photographer Sergio Santoian and artist Louise Helène. It features Guilherme Abreu as the model, whose body is painted with the word “viado” (a pejorative term for homosexual in Portuguese) written in different forms and angles. The shoot took place on August 1, 2021, in the living room of an apartment located in the Tijuca neighborhood in Alvorada, in an improvised studio, using a Canon T100, a black cloth on the wall, and a warm set light.
We possess many characteristics, many of which are mutable, but we are condemned by the only one that we cannot change, marked on the skin like permanent ink. It is the one that moves us and makes us belong to ourselves. This shoot seeks to be a portrait of a road that for many is just an ordinary road, but for the LGBTQIA+ community, it is uncertainty, as we live at the mercy of constant dangers hidden along the way.
Backyard Memories: Life and Work of Peasant and Quilombola Women in Rural Brazil (2019-2023)
Renata Borges Kempf (Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul – UFFS)
The photos displayed in this collection were captured during the elaboration of the doctoral thesis entitled “Knowledges and practices of peasant and quilombola women in agriculture: producing forms of resistance and existence.” This research investigated work practices and knowledge transmission among peasant and quilombola women in different contexts. Using an ethnographic method, photography was one of the main tools employed in the research fields in Pinhão (PR) and Barra do Turvo (SP). With the camera in hand, I shared the daily lives of the research interlocutors, capturing the moments when they shared their knowledge, demonstrating their work practices, and sharing life stories. The selected photographs highlight hands, faces, and landscapes that reflect the women’s daily work and struggles. It is hoped that, like the bridges that connect the community in Quilombo Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca, these images connect the public to the struggle of these women. Science and art are thus tools in the fight for land regularization and the rights of the peasant and quilombola women who were partners of this research and for those throughout Brazil.
Women in Struggle (2010-2024)
Francys do Nascimento Silva (Rede Nacional de Feministas Antiproibicionistas – RENFA)
Fran Silva is a communicator, photographer, founder and communication coordinator of the National Network of Anti-Prohibitionist Feminists, organizer of the Marijuana March Recife since 2010 and member of the National Articulation of Marijuana Marches. An anti-prohibitionist activist, since 2010 I have been building and recording the struggle of women in marches, demonstrations and in their daily lives. Photography moves me, and I understand the need to use it as a strategic tool not only for denunciation and defense, but to guarantee, from my place of speech, deconstructing digital colonialism, and hacking languages through photography. It’s about telling silenced stories by bringing them all into image. The proposal is to bring to the exhibition photographs of women in marches and in struggle that I have been following since 2010, and to screen a documentary from the National Network of Anti-Prohibitionist Feminists that tells the story of how women who use drugs have constructed this network in different states and territories. They are united in a single objective: to end the war on drugs, in which racism is a pillar of this inequality.
WOMEN-TERRITORY: The re-existence of Indigenous Women in Western Bahia (2021-2024)
Miléia Santos Almeida (Universidade de Brasília – UNB)
Marta Aparecida dos Santos Mamédio (Universidade FEderal do Recôncavo da Bahia – UFRB)
The ancestral (re)existence of Indigenous women is expressed through their decisive action on the grounds of their villages, in the struggle for their territories, in the valorization of biodiversity, in the production of good living and in the defense of their rights. In Bahia, a land with a long history not only of colonial violence, but of voracious resistance, Indigenous women give new meaning to their roles of leadership and care, while preserving their ancestors traditions. Women are important agents of the villages’ self-sustainability through beadwork, ceramics and food planting. Protagonists of their stories, the Indigenous women of western Bahia self-demarcate their territories and their importance in the struggle for and defense of rights. With five chiefdoms governed by women and several female leaders in all the villages, which are enrooted in a region considered the agribusiness hub of Bahia, these women-territories continue to decolonize hearts and minds. Women like Maria Kiriri, the second woman chief of Brazil, in Muquém de São Francisco, and the vice chief Daniele Potiguara who echos “we are land” to claim an original right, highlight the scenes in our photo exhibition.
Ancestral panacea (2021)
Rita de Cássia de Almeida Souza (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina – UDESC)
Panacea
macerated plant, magic ritual
potion believed to cure all ills
that which is used to remedy any and all difficulties
Feminine noun
“Tribadism is an ancestral panacea that is worth living”, said Black lesbian poet Cheryl Clarke.
Black women, life companions and lovers
Alchemists of daily life
licking wounds and breasts
curing undiagnosable pain
with food, presence and heat
Caressing the stony walls of theirs deepest crevices
so that they never dry out again
Love between Black women is ancestral
and is worth living
Women’s heritage is the memory of the earth: I won’t leave here again, even if I’m dead (2023)
Maria Carmencita Job (Universidade FEderal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS)
This essay is the result of field research carried out for my doctoral thesis, in which I analyze the experiences with mobility of urban individuals moving from the city to rural regions,
In this visual ethnography, I present the memory of the land, as a feminine heritage of Nonô Joris, a white, city-dwelling woman, a 52-year-old journalist who lived all her life in the city of Porto Alegre and who, in May 2021, during the pandemic, went to live in the rural region of Nova Petrópolis with her three dogs and two cats.
The pandemic changed her life completely and having experienced a condition of financial and emotional fragility made her reflect carefully on her practices and memories and discover herself as a rural woman, like her settler grandmother.
“Life is very crazy, this is the memory I have of my grandmother, and I have returned to everything later. You see: my grandmother lived alone, very similar to what is happening to me now. And then she never married again. She had a cow, pig, chicken. She took care of everything herself, she only had one employee to help take care of some things. She lived well outdoors. Today this is my life. I feel like this is my path, now I am on my path.” (Nono, 2023)
It’s possible that blue suits you well (2021)
Manuela de Souza de A. Leite (USP)
The imposition of the maxim that the good “housewife” is the heroine of the female universe did not end with the arrival of women in the workforce; on the contrary, the reinforcement of the stereotype “to love means caring and serving” continues to have effect in the 21st century. The significant difference is that women now must be successful professionally, financially independent, but, as in their “archetypal past,” they must remain devoted to their families. Unpaid domestic work remains predominantly female, and the responsibility for managing households falls on women. So, even women who earn an income outside the home and/or marriage, who have good salaries that allow them to hire a domestic worker, still have to administer their homes alone, care for the details, plan the routines and guarantee smooth running of the household. “It’s possible that blue suits you well” is intended to problematize the imprisoned life of work routines, compounded by the perpetual cycles of domestic chores, a responsibility that has been culturally assigned to women.
Football court: exploring dreams within fences (2024)
Bernd Bodewes
The sidelines of the football pitch offer a unique vantage point to observe the dynamics of the community of Morro da Babilonia, in Rio de Janeiro. It is a place where children navigate their roles and identities within the game and beyond. In these photographs we witness the physical agility of the players and the resilience and determination in their expressions. Children on the sidelines watch with wide-eyed wonder, imagining themselves in the thick of the action, while those on the field embody the spirit of possibility and progress. Amidst the cheers and laughter, there is a poignant reminder of the constraints imposed by society, symbolized by the playground fences. Yet, within this confined space, there is freedom – freedom to dream, to challenge, and to defy the status quo, assuming leadership as a referee or becoming the best football player in the world. These photographs invite us to contemplate the parallels between the football pitch and the wider world, where the struggle for equality persists, and the pursuit of dreams knows its boundaries. The last picture was taken with an analog camera.
About Care (2023)
Carla Angelini (Instituto Universitario Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires – IUHIBA)
Let’s play. Let’s look. Let’s listen. Let’s accompany. Let’s caress. Let’s talk. Or let’s just sit next to each other without words in between. Let’s wait for those who were left behind and reach out to them to walk together. Let’s encourage them to cheer up. Let’s laugh. And let’s cry. Let’s resist violence, let’s face it with love as the wonderful bell hooks said. Let’s socialize care and build networks. Let’s socialize in affectivity, recognizing our own desires and those of others. Let’s show our vulnerability; it’s part of our humanity. There will be others who will take care of us at that time, and they will hold our hand. Or they will sit next to us and wait in silence for the storm to pass.
Take care of them. Take care of yourself. Let’s take care of ourselves.
Dreamy (2021)
Leonardo Vinicius Fabiano (Universidade Federal de Maringá – UEM)
We must delve into the gaps, between deep sleep and wakefulness, in the pain of getting up and waiting for a rest. The dream, a dream, any dream. Flashes of stimuli that at times dialogue with us, at times confuse us, in ways that make distinguishing life and dreams barely possible. Through this movement, of sneaking between, activating a dream code in the waking state and implanting concrete needs through dreams, other narratives emerge, less adapted to the structuring mold of the subjects. What do you dream, beyond what you were allowed to dream? What lives are gestating in the imaginary state, that reality has not been able to create? It’s overflowing and flooding the world with jets of fiction that create your reality. It all begins with a crack, a fissure, through which a drop of a dream passes, an infiltration that dismantles from the inside out and makes itself seen through your fears, your pleasures, your anguish and your conforts, in a suggestive invitation to dream together those things that we didn’t dare to dream of before.
TRANSforming Grief into Struggle (2024)
Carol Esmanhotto (Pontifícia Universidade Católica)
The records displayed here tell the story of a tireless movement of struggle and TRANSformation that has been growing in Florianópolis. Under the slogan “Transforming Grief into Struggles”, the images I share are visual witnesses of Ato 8M in Florianópolis and this collective force that we are.
Along the way, a lot of rain and many fights passed through the streets of Florianópolis, raising their voices, their banners, posters, beliefs, art and diverse bodies, drawing attention to the diversity and inclusion that permeate the feminist movement today.
“Feminisms must engage in active and inclusive dialogue with the TRANS community, recognizing that the fight for gender equality can only be truly effective when it embraces all gender identities and opposes all forms of gender oppression.” -Judith Butler
May these images serve as a testament to our unwavering commitment to transforming grief into struggle, and may we continue to march together, side by side, until all voices are heard, all rights are guaranteed and all injustices are eradicated.
Tulpas – From the depths of the subconscious to the acquiescence of the self (2023)
Decchi Bottesi (Pontifícia Universidade Católica – PUC SP)
Tulpas began in 2023 as a photobook of portraits for a final undergraduate project, with academic aims of exploring and reinterpreting expressionist and pictorial aesthetics and techniques, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The project was conducted by a non-binary person, pre-hormonal transition, while in social transition and self-discovery. The use of the expressive elements in portrait (such as clothing, makeup, ornaments, masks, veils, and the post-production of the images themselves) allowed an exploration of questions regarding their gender self-expression, like the balance between the needs of being seen and the urge to hide themselves: while craving to be seen, or disappear; in the urge to hide, reveal.
With the creation of “personas” or “tulpas” (which in broad terms means an “independent mental construct”), the photo’s subjects wear clothes and ornaments that they photographer wore during their social transition, often in the company of the people portrayed.
