FER NOGUEIRA

The Brazilian Porn Art Movement Inside Out: a Collective Narration for a Topos of Desire and Resilience

Why does an artistic manifestation remain excluded from History? How can the disruptive power of actions that took place in the past continue in the present? What kind of operations are involved in making such memories public? The research project “The Brazilian Porn Art Movement Inside Out: a Collective Narration for a Topos of Desire and Resilience,” developed in the Ph.D. in Practice program, addressed such questions in the process of telling the histories of the Porn Art Movement in Brazil in the 1980s, a case that remained absent from any local or world historiography of art before this genealogical research project started. The investigation sought to understand what happened in the decline of the military dictatorship in Brazil and how a specific artistic practice—Porn Art—has contributed to building a democratic public sphere. The critical essays in the dissertation dwell on how people responded aesthetically and politically to their present. The narratives of seduction/sedition on the relationship between art, poetry, and pornography had counter-methodologies as a basis to acknowledge life experiences, affections, and particularities of that territory. Along with the theoretical analysis of that artistic and poetic initiative, those testimonies, documents, and studies constitute a stratigraphy of the remains of the Porn Art Movement. They contribute to the formation of queer/kuir/cuir/bicha cartographies and historiographies from/of the South involving both body and poetry, as well as gender activism, and are part of the memories of struggles and artistic acts of resistance in Latin America.

Fer Nogueira (b. 1982, São Paulo) [they, she] is a researcher of social and political dimensions of the arts, an art historian, literary critic, and curator. They received a bachelor’s degree in Letters (Portuguese and Spanish), a licentiate degree in Education, and a master’s degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo. They also pursued a professional master’s degree in Museum Studies and Critical Theory through the Independent Studies Program at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Their research project was granted the Full Doctorate Abroad Fellowship from CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education (Brazil), and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.