Como as coisas da casa: the undomesticated body in Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark

• In Event: Performing insurrections. Four cuir anthropophagic perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of house in the work of Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark as a concept, mode of operation and enunciation. During the latter half of the 20th century, while Brazil was experiencing the transition from concrete and neo-concrete avant-gardes insufflated by the hope in economic development and social justice to a disastrous military dictatorship, both artists subverted the violence installed by the identitarian, nationalistic, and patriarchal logic of society and art. Taking the domestic environment, usually linked to women’s subjectivity and bodies, their artworks did not separate the house from female subjectivity, as demanded by a significant contingent of the feminist second wave at that moment. Instead, Lispector and Clark refused a crystallized and infertile notion of the house embedded onto patriarchal discourse and colonial-capitalistic unconscious. From The passion according to G.H. (Lispector,1964) and Structuring of the self (Clark, 1966-88), I argue that the relationship between architecture and the objects of the house that are constantly incorporated and secreted radically transform the body that inhabits the house. Because of this, house, world, body, cave, womb, egg, word, all work as porous shapes that undo stable definitions of species, of generations, as well as the nature/culture dichotomy. The result is a pregnant body of the universe that installs a sensible relationship within the materiality of common life, making indistinct the creation of art and life.

Author

• Maiara Knihs