Body and Image: how to Capture a Performative Moment

Abstract

This essay investigates the ways in which a past event, or a performative moment, in the author's terms, can be reframed or reimagined from a documentary and archival approach. Taking as a starting point a site-specific performance lab, developed during an artist's residency on the small island of Paquetá, in Rio de Janeiro, this essay offers, on the one hand, a perspective that arises through the performative and somatic encounter with a specific territory and community. On the other hand, it offers a methodology for how to use documentation as an artistic research tool, both in the production of documentary material and in the composition of an artistic work. In this process, such methodology serves not only as a basis for the production of a series of images that evoke some of the forgotten legends or idyllic landscapes of Paquetá (e.g., the cemetery of birds), but also for the emergence of a singular bodily posture or, in other words, a performative moment around which both a documentary and fictional narrative was woven.