Biographical Poetics of the Explanted Body: Notes on Three Brazilian Visual Essays

Abstract

This text proposes a reflection about the images of the female body through the visual essays of three Brazilian artists: Karka Keiko, Fiamma Viola and Maria Luísa Andrade. Three main annotations were made to the images under analysis: the first discusses the themes of the female body that figure in the media, artistic and cultural contexts that make up a specifically feminist research agenda; the second observes how the artists lend their explanted bodies, submitted to surgical procedures, to build a work of creative and narrative elaboration of themselves through the images; and the third, traces the aesthetic-political breaking points caused by the essayistic images indicating the poetic resource as a gesture of resistance in a society flooded with selfies. In developing the discussion, we can observe that this content travels both in visual and artistic elaborations, at galleries and museums, and in the form of postings, through renowned digital platforms and social networks to expand the reach of the public gaze. They can create an enunciative scene on the screens, and the bodies of women who have undergone breast explantation suggest a reflection on the new forms of linking the gaze on the female body.