(IN)APPROPRIATE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A BODY AND A DRESS

This work is about creating an action based on the relationship with a personal object, a dress of my childhood. The original wish was to put on the dress, a way to feel body-child again, and so I did. But the desire changed while I was wearing the dress; it did not suit me. The uncomfortable dress was threatening the body identity, remembering the impossibility of the grown body inside the little dress.

This time-based action is made to be exclusively documented, with no beholder whatsoever while happening. I seek instead to engage the viewer in the remains of the action. The documents were cropped to exclude the parts of the body that did not fit inside the dress, providing the viewer to perceive the action through the absence of that which was cropped, a way to give existence to another awareness of feeling/being body.

The performance is part of a collaborative project titled “Objects for loss (notes about the desire to lose),” which seeks to realize artwork about loss, starting from personal objects, and reflect theoretically on the subject in the disciplines of photography (Fabiana Wielewicki) and performance (Teresa Luzio). The full text will be published in cadernos PAR, a Portuguese academic and scientific journal, in 2014.