Pega, picou, vai picar, mamba negra! Um corpo expandido na confluência das Artes Visuais com o vogue femme

Abstract

This final course research results from the significant experiences I lived throughout my trajectory in the Visual Arts Bachelor’s program, especially those that enabled the encounter between my existence as a Black travesti person, my practices in Visual Arts, and my immersion in Ballroom culture. The research unfolds from my Undergraduate Research project, a moment in which I reflected on how the Vogue Femme expression, originating in Ballroom culture, constitutes an ancestral manifestation of rescue and remembrance of expressions and identities that were historically repressed, fostering self-empowerment and strengthening one’s existence in the world. This trajectory also includes my participation in the Xica Manicongo Collective, through which I contributed to important institutional achievements for the trans and travesti community at the Federal University of Goiás, as well as the organization of actions such as the Trans Visibility Ball. From these experiences, I proposed to discuss an expanded body that creates art at the confluence of Visual Arts and Ballroom culture, establishing a dialogue between painting and performance, in which I understood my body as an active element in the construction of the artwork. Through this approach, I investigated how performative gestures can produce painting and how painting can unfold into action, presence, and movement. This process led me to the concept of expanded body/painting, in which the body not only creates the image but also becomes the very surface and territory of painting, drawing from the expression of Vogue Femme and other elements of Ballroom culture to expand the boundaries between support, gesture, and expression. The methodology adopted is Autobiographical Research in Art, combined with the concepts of Escrevivência and TRANSescrevivência. The objective of this research was to investigate, from an autobiographical perspective, how Ballroom culture in dialogue with Visual Arts can constitute a means of expression and (re)existence in racist, transphobic, and oppressive social contexts. Thus, I sought to stimulate artistic poetics and creative processes inspired by Ballroom culture that could function as a poetic and political process of resistance, in which my story can be told through art.