Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi: Radical Wanderings, Gestures of Terror and Fugitivity in Flesh*Abstract
In this essay, I provide a brief overview of Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi’s artistic output (works created between 2012 and 2018), focusing on some of her performances, ephemeral live actions, and writings. At the same time, I read Mattiuzzi’s practice in dialogue with a few other black woman artists from Brazil, thus offering one provisional and short mapping of the current output from black Brazilian artists. Through this mapping, I attempt to provide an expanded understanding of contemporary artistic production in Brazil and offer some insights on particular interventions to the field that have been made by black Brazilian artists. I also argue that, through what I am naming radical wanderings, Mattiuzzi stretches and deepens the tension created by her body and presence (and by art) in the public sphere, thus making a radical expansion on the discussion proposed by some of her contemporaries about black womanhood in Brazil. Moreover, I argue that Mattiuzzi’s aesthetic procedures (re)present a theoretical feminist intervention.
Michelle Mattiuzzi; Performance; Black Performance; Contemporary Art; Contemporary Art from Brazil; Black Brazilian Artists; Black Feminism
Source: Courtesy of the artist.
Photograph: Hirosuke Kitamura.
Photograph: Hirosuke Kitamura.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.
Source: Courtesy of the Artist.
Photograph: Hirosuke Kitamura.
Photograph: Marcelo Paixão.
Foto: Marcelo Paixão
