Salvador and São Paulo artists : intersecting disability with the performance art

Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Brazil was the territory of important questions in the field of the arts, which implied conceptual and functional interpellations of the body. This historical period is exemplary of the study from which I present the work of three Brazilian artists with physical disabilities: Edu O., of Salvador (BA), and Estela Lapponi and Roger Migliorini, of São Paulo (SP). The general question is to think of the interweaving between biography, trajectory and repertoire as factors that imply tensions in the experience and perception of the physical disability. I will dwell on the scope of performance art in its ways of creating knowledge and practices that, in harmony with the artist's experience in their networks, in different spaces, destabilizes the meanings given to the body, creating a perspective that causes cracks in certain body normativities. To this end, I present the work of art as corporal politics in this recent landscape of the arts, which is marginal, in order to think what it presents again for the field of Gender Studies, adding to the existing debate on body and rights. This context produced two sensitive changes for the purpose of the study that I will present: one of them was the opening of artists and their works to the public sphere, unfolding, in this specific case, the idea of art as law, expanding the plural relation between art and politics ; the other was the diversification of notions of body from techniques, methods and knowledge, which made possible the recognition and legitimation of a bodily diversity, in order to respond to the new meanings produced by the policies of the movement. Thus, the art of performance was responsible for subsidizing new repertoires of activism, criticizing artistic, governmental and non-governmental paradigms and social movements in their confrontation of social impediments posed by diseases and injuries, transforming them into cultural criticism and in a thought that considers the body as a platform of political resistance from the construction of gender technologies that strain normativities and their precariousness (AU)