Appropriation
The project investigates the symbols of sexuality in art and entertainment, revealing dynamics of power, marginalization, and resistance. It explores the symbolic language of prostitution, eroticism, fetish, BDSM, and other subversive themes that permeate sexuality and its social and economic impact.
This project examines the use of these symbols both in the realms of art and entertainment, while also highlighting the concurrent marginalization of sex workers. Through the analysis of cultural representations, it seeks to understand how sexuality is portrayed and symbolized across various forms of media and art, and how these representations influence public perception and the social treatment of sex workers.
Sex work, in its various manifestations — prostitution, camming, striptease, pole dance, burlesque, BDSM, fetish, and the cinematic pornographic industry — inhabits a space marked by structures of power, appropriation, and subversion. These bodies that perform desire are simultaneously object and subject within a pleasure economy that reveals both the oppressive dynamics of capitalism and the potentials for autonomy and resistance.
Fetiche 1 (mukbang)
Menu: Ceviche, Sancocho, Pamonha, Café, Bolo de Fubá (pastel de harina de maíz) y Feijoada
The performance proposes a reflection on the politics of marginalized bodies within sexual contexts. The body, covered by a latex bodysuit and mask, becomes an anonymous and fetishized surface where identity disappears, giving way to a territory of projection and consumption.
By ingesting dishes such as feijoada, pamonha, ceviche, or sancocho, the action goes beyond the act of eating. These foods operate as symbols that condense colonial histories, subsistence economies, and cultural resistances. Their flavors, associated with contexts often labeled as “underdeveloped,” are brought into the performative space as materials of tension. The act of eating reveals the paradox between the celebration of these cultures and their simultaneous exoticization and exploitation.
In this way, the performance establishes a mirror between the consumption of marginalized bodies in the sexual imaginary and the material consumption of territories and peoples positioned within structures of global inequality. Latex, as both a material of protection and fetish, intensifies this contradiction: what is hidden is also exposed, what is desired is also disposable.
The black mask, in particular, alludes to processes of appropriation and erasure of narratives. In dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the work suggests that a mask is never neutral: it functions as a mediation between desire and violence, imposition and survival. If, for Fanon, the white mask embodies the pressure to conform to a colonial norm, here the black mask exposes the tension of carrying an identity that has been consumed, exoticized, and transformed into fetish.
The performance seeks to strain the boundaries between pleasure, inequality, and resistance, inviting reflection on how the erotic, the economic, and the cultural intertwine in the lived experience of dissident bodies.
