Corporeality Manifesto (2025)

Our body is our first and ultimate reality.

Corpo-Reality. [1]

A mani-festo, a celebration of hands: a text in which I make obvious what I bring with me, what I make, and what I offer.

The only True Knowledge is knowledge of who I am. To manifest is to act through this knowledge.

The first inevitable Truth: We were all born out of a womb.

Remember the placenta.

Before us, there was desire.

A manifesto carries in text the form of knowledge that expresses the desire for the continuation of life. I speak of what I know to be Truth, without the need to prove it. Like the Goddess Mother, I affirm.

Life has a way of working out.

There are already many goddesses. As many as we need to liberate ourselves from coloniality.

Osun. Maria. Mãe Terra. Shakti. Manat. Pele.

We can create Others.

The Goddess of the Soil Factory.

The Goddess of Belly Laughter.

The Goddess of the Fruit Tree.

The Goddess of You Are the Dancing Queen.

I want to remember everything that kept me alive.

Meet the mother who undoes the knot. She, who knows how to be still until the only necessary movement is clear. My grandmother's hands touched all that brought me here.

We need every-Body. No one can be wasted; Every-Body is an artist; we can't afford to lose anyone. The mad turned shaman; the weak, a reference for all we need to give up; the lazy, our hero.

Like Bartleby, I'd prefer not to. Unlike him, after I refuse the formula, I consider my only choice. [2]

The only True choice is the one that doesn't paralyze me. The one that flows through my breasts. It generates the energy. Desire again. It is emergent in the body:

The gut, the heart, the goosebumps, the lightness on the legs, the furtive smile.

The body is not only political/biopolitical, it doesn't simply keep the score, it isn't merely the home of the spirit. Yet, "The Spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without a body." We cannot be disembodied. [3]

The body is.

resourceful

lovable

apaixonado

malleable

humorous

pure fun

alive.

Before it decomposes, I compose, add layers, compost, use, and reuse. The reality of the body is the present moment that transits all the consequences of the past into the future. Its Nature is trans: it is constant transformation. The consciousness that reaches the muscle forms it in stretch or relaxation.

In corporeality, performance doesn’t exist. The brain plasticity recycles the microplastics. The revolution has been happening. Some never stopped planting the food forest.

We were animals.

We were cannibals.

We were humans.

We were gods.

We were scientists.

And we were cyborgs.

We are natives.

We are immigrants.

We are anthropologists.

We are artists.

We nourish the Body with matter and meaning; we dream and build with Others.

History is written in the Body-. Art reads it in each -Movement. It is Corpo-Reality.

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[1] The word in Portuguese that precedes this manifesto is “corporeidade,” which I encountered in Leda Maria Martin’s work, making a difference between North American performance and the work of Brazilian artists as “corporeidade.”

[2] Here I’m referencing Gilles Deleuze “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” which appears in “Essays Critical and Clinical,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 68-90.

[3] Andrade, Oswald de. "Manifesto Antropófago." Revista de Antropofagia, no. 1, 1928, pp. 3-7.

The theory of the Mo-Om-object (2020)

The theory of the Mo-Om-object is a play with the "Theory of the Non-object," written by Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar in 1959. While Gullar's theory is about the history of modern art — he argues that the non-object was the destination, the end-point, of the liberation of the artwork from signification — the theory of the Mo-Om-object is the manifestation of universal knowing expressed in the materiality of life. When liberated from signification, the artwork can then exist/be perceived from the common ground of our shared material condition. Gullar wrote that the non-object "is a transparent body (...) through which a synthesis of sensorial and mental experiences is intended to take place". The Mo-Om-object is the body that integrates experiences (mental, sensorial, spiritual, cultural, natural...); it is not a destination but the present time in which trans-actions exist. The Mo-Om-object is not "transparent" because it is not an appearance; it doesn't appear to be — it simply is — and through being, in the constant activation of the present time, the Mo-Om-object is trans. It trans-figures, trans-verses, trans-forms.

The continuing return of the a-ha moment, in which perception meets consciousness, in which making meets meaning, leads back to making and so on and so forth. The Mo-Om-object is Paulo Freire’s conscientização in material form. The Mo-Om-object is the spiral of time that was not stretched into a line by coloniality. It is not organized chronologically but exists in the time of kairos, the opportune time, the time when action is manifested, connections happen, when luck strikes, fortune is granted, and abundance is noticed.

The Mo-Om-object is the negation of the negation in the non-object. It is what emerges from a negation, that which reverberates into something else. The Mo-Om-object is that something else, it is emergent. "Mo," the word for "I" in Yoruba, and "Om," the word for "ultimate reality" in Hindu texts. Words, sounds, air that vibrates inside and outside of us. The material of air that bounces back, breaks through, carries forth life. The breath. The breathing that guarantees life. Mo-Om-objects are marks of the end of the enigma. They are the creative act in itself. They are portals to the continuity of creativity.

The theory of the Mo-Om-object is a form of play because it follows a child's perspective: the child doesn't separate play from life. The Mo-Om-object exists in the same space as the reality of play for the child; the ultimate reality. In this way, differently from Helio Oiticica's Parangolé, which was an in-corporation, Mo-Om-objects are trans-corporeal. Mo-Om-objects translate, transfuse, transgress, transcend, transubstantiate. Different than the works of Lygia Clark, Mo-Om-objects are not propositions. Mo-Om-objects are post-therapy. They are not exercises of freedom; they are expressions of freedom. Freedom in itself. Mo-Om-objects don't propose; they transpose. Like the child who plays-with, the Mo-Om-object exists-with. The theory of the Mo-Om-object is a form of play because it vanishes when care is gone, when attention ends.