Performance

Stella do Patrocínio (1941-1992) was hospitalized in 1962 in the psychiatric hospital Colônia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 21. In the asylum, where she remained until her death, she developed her unclassifiable falatório, a performative, poetic, violent, critical, and prophetic chatter, centering around bichos as one of the main and disruptive figures. This ‘chatter’ addressed social, racial, and gender issues and critically related to her own lived experience as a Black psychiatrized woman. In the midst of a racist, patriarchal, and extremely unequal society, in which psychiatry functioned as a powerful social regulation tool, Do Patrocínio’s metamorphosing into a bicho could be read as an act of invention and resistance.

In the late 1980s and beginning of 1990s, her falatório was recorded, first by the artist Carla Guagliardi and later by Mônica Ribeiro de Souza, a trainee in psychology. These materials provided the basis for a book of poems published in 2001.

After the staged reading of Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório with Yvonne Sembene there will be a presentation by Carla Guagliardi, followed by conversation with Delfina Cabrera, Marlon Miguel, and Elena Vogman

Yvonne Sembene is a French-Senegalese dancer and artist, raised in Luxembourg and based in Berlin. She has taken part in several projects as a performer and developed her own collaborative work exploring multidisciplinary formats and social de/reconstruction through movement and sound. She has also established a dramaturgy practice focussing on identity and cultural accessibility.

Carla Guagliardi is a Brazilian artist, active in the art circuit with exhibitions in institutions in Brazil and abroad, who has been living between Rio de Janeiro and Berlin since 1997. She studied at EAV Parque Lage and graduated in Art History and Architecture in Brazil at PUC-RJ. She was one of the founders of the Visorama group, promoting debates about contemporary art. From 1986 onwards, she was part of a group of artists who implemented a working group of free artistic expression at the psychiatric public hospital Colônia Juliano Moreira, where she met Bispo do Rosário and Stella do Patrocínio. This working group was related to the Brazilian anti-asylum movement (movimento antimanicomial).

First came the world of the living, then life and death, after the dead, after the bichos and the animals, you make yourself comfortable as a bichos and as an animal.

Stella do Patrocínio

From the late 1960s onwards, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) developed a series of unstable and manipulable sculptures that she named bichos — ‘beast’, ‘animal’, or ‘critter’. These unconventional objects constituted a turning point in Clark’s artistic trajectory as she progressively moved away from the Neo-Concrete Movement, shifting her focus towards the frontier between artistic and clinical practice. Already with the bichos, Clark thought about how spectators could transform and de-subjectivate themselves, perhaps becoming more than human by interacting with these abstract but nevertheless organic objects. Later, convinced that she could revitalize the field of art through psychotherapeutic techniques, Clark claimed that her work was ‘a state of art, without art’, where both art and the clinic could retrieve their critical potential vis-à-vis dominant modes of subjectivation.

A few years later, and in a radically different context, Black Brazilian poet Stella do Patrocínio (1941–1992) created bichos as some of the main and disruptive figures of her unclassifiable falatório, a sort of poetic, violent, performative, prophetic, and delirious speech. Do Patrocínio produced her incessant chatter or even diatribe in the psychiatric asylum Colônia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro, where she spent most of her life. In the midst of a racist, patriarchal, and extremely unequal society, where psychiatry functioned as a powerful social regulation tool, do Patrocínio’s poetic metamorphosing into a bichos could be read as an act of invention and resistance.

This symposium takes the model and motif of the bichos as a starting point to explore intersections between art, gender, and the field of mental health. What is the relationship between madness and racist, gender-based, and social forms of oppression? How have racialized and queer subjects been constrained by exclusionary forms of psychiatry? What strategies have they created to overturn, criticize, or simply survive within such forms? What connections are possible between the bichos produced by Clark and do Patrocínio? And what can one learn from these disruptive animal figures about resistance and artistic invention?