Topographies of Violence

We inhabit a cartography etched by the repetition of structural violence — violence that shapes flesh, subjectivity, and geography. The queer and dissident body — racialized, deviated, pathologized — becomes a palimpsest where power inscribes its norms and, simultaneously, where insurgencies are rewritten. It is a body that defies architectures of control: performing outside cisheteronormativity, beyond capitalist productivity, and outside the binary epistemologies of Western science.

In this context, art emerges not as refuge but as a dystopian arena — a stage where the protocols of pain and the noise of oppression are aestheticized as denunciation and political gesture. Within this terrain of collapse, BDSM operates as a symbolic machine: a performative language, a dramatization of consent and power, capable of distorting the lines between domination and desire, violence and care, system and failure.

By engaging BDSM as a critical aesthetic, this project seeks to map the topographies of violence — where the body is marked, exposed, displaced, but also where it resists, reacts, and rebuilds itself. The restraints become diagrams of biopolitical control, yet also choreographies of possible freedom. Consensual pain stands in contrast to imposed pain. Performance becomes a sensitive cartography of a fractured world.

This is an expanded reflection on mechanisms of normalization, surveillance, and exclusion imposed upon nonconforming bodies — and how those bodies, when turned into art, language, ritual, and fiction, sabotage the very systems that seek to discipline them. It is about occupying space with bodies that refuse obedience, that overflow gender, language, and function.

Here, dystopia is not imagined — it is the concrete present. Yet, by translating it into aesthetic, what emerges is a laboratory-territory where affection, memory, sex, art, and risk compose a new grammar of presence.

A woman with black hair and bangs sitting on the floor in a grime-filled room, with her legs spread apart. She is topless, covering her nipples with pasties, and holding a large, red, broken lobster shell. The room has various electrical equipment, wires, and machinery, and an unkempt, industrial appearance.
Three photographs of marble surfaces with red stains, with the middle photo having small black text that reads 'suite of 10' and a red stain dripping from the bottom.
An old typewriter with a red cloth or piece of fabric draped behind it, and the typewriter is damaged and missing parts, placed next to a box of empty typewriter ribbon spools and a small mechanical device on a white surface with bloodstains.

The Painter

This is the issue of gender in art (art market and history), specifically the predominance of cisgender men. Based, for example, on the work “The advantages of being a female artist (1988/2017)” by Guerrila Girls, which exhibited at MASP in 2017 and addresses the contrast between the small number of female, non-binary, trans, and queer artists, compared to the large number of nude female bodies in the exhibition of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York (5% and 85% in 1989, 4% and 76% in 2012) and at MASP (6% and 60% in 2017). In the performance, the constant and repetitive act evokes a sexual act in its phallocentric form, symbolizing the persistent cultural dominance of cisgender men in the art world — both historically and within the market. The screen represents the feminine, the queer, and the non-binary; its whiteness suggests an attempted erasure of these identities. The act of tearing through the screen becomes a gesture of ongoing violation, a metaphor for how these bodies and narratives are repeatedly invaded, silenced, or overwritten.

Two black leather harnesses with metal buckles, each with attached knives, arranged against a white background.

Rose Compass

A metaphor for the contemporary subject.
We live orienting ourselves between possible directions, in a fragmented world where the center has shifted (as in Deleuze and Guattari — rhizome and deterritorialization).
The compass rose gives us the illusion of a stable center, but it is a symbolic construction. The true movement of being perhaps lies in decentering, in navigating without a fixed map. The compass rose would then be a device of comfort in the face of the abyss.

Performance with shibari.
Shibari - Foraisso
Photographic records and filming: Ludimilla Russo

Close-up of a person's thigh with tattoos, tied with rope.
A person in athletic wear practicing aerial silks inside a gym with large windows exposing a cityscape of high-rise buildings.
Person performing a headstand in a yoga pose on the floor, with their hair hanging downward and their hands supporting their head.
A person is tied with rope around their body and arms, with a tattoo visible on their shoulder, sitting near a window with blinds.
Black and white photo of a woman with long hair looking down, with a tattoo on her arm and shoulder, standing in front of a window.
A woman hanging upside down from a swinging rope, with her eyes closed, in a room with a plain wall and some fabric on the floor.
A woman in fishnet lingerie hanging upside down from a trapeze in a room with a wooden floor, with clothes and fabric on the floor.
Black and white photo of a woman with tattoos, wearing a sheer top, tied with a knot around her waist, with long hair, looking downward.
A woman in a fishnet outfit hanging upside down on aerial silks in a gym or studio.
A man and a woman practicing acrobatics in a room with large windows, with the man holding the woman upside down in a pose.
A woman practicing aerial yoga or hammocking, hanging upside down with her body extended horizontally, inside a room with large windows showing a cityscape in the background.

Corpo Estranho

Corpo Estranho” in english Weird Body, was a performance made in 2012 about : sexuality - specifically sexual abuse - queer theory and erasure of the body both in the social and cultural spheres, specifically mentioning walkers and sexual professionals for their personal experience with these two media.
The name “Corpo Estranho” was inspired by the book “A weird body: essays on sexuality and queer theory” by Guacira Lopes Louro

Four images of a person in white clothing with red paint on their face and hands, lying on a white surface in different positions.