The displacement of the free body in the work by the artists Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi and Zanele Muholi

The productions of the artists Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi and Zanele Muholi articulate another order of visibility. They are productions that constitute themselves as self-revealed. They challenge the status quo they operate in the order of a colonial representation system under the aegis of policies of domination in their racialist, gender and sexuality expressions. Mattiuzzi and Muholi inscribe their productions in a self-determined and self-revealed perspective, putting in place other regimes of representation, operating with the logic of disorganization of the visibility roles crystallized by the authoritarianism of coloniality.

Zanele Muholi is a South African lesbian artist who calls herself a visual activist. Using the language of photography, Muholi promotes her visual activism in a self-revealed way, that is, she makes visible the presence of lesbians in the South African scene, since this presence is denied, brutalized and effortlessly unrecognized.

Following the thought of Audre Lorde in the text “Transforming silence into language and action”, “in the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation”. Zanele Muholi’s production represents a break with silence. Her series “Faces and Phases” (2006) brings to the surface all the potent eloquence of the presence, the voice, the recognition and the lesbian body in the urban South African context. Her aesthetic thinking overflows a circumscribed poetics in the first person, inaugurating another possibility to re-exist and exist both in the order of representation and in the order of representativeness.

Like Muholi in Africa, the artist Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi in her critical text on the performance “Só entro no jogo” [I only enter the game], held in 2013 in the city of Salvador, brings in her poetics a visibility construct of the presence of the Brazilian black woman. From the perspective of Capoeira’s epistemology, the performer puts her body into play. Now it is the black female body that plays with visibility, enhancing her complex self-revelation. The action program proposed by Mattiuzzi points to the perception and recognition of a constitutively challenging body. It considers that the black female body is historically a body built as a maximized body, perceived as a representation of restrictions and dehumanizations and at the same time as the possibility of desire.

Mattiuzzi presents a black female body that is agency, it is the body of self-determination that Audre Lorde talks about. The presence that the performer establishes in the public space encourages passersby around her to interact in a provocative way. The actions raised contaminate the responses generated by each participant. In a responsive attitude, each participant involved in the performance is assuming a challenging ethos, as if the audience and the performer’s body were transformed into a single body. By responsive attitude, I name the constructed interactions and responses that passersby compose together with the performer.

Mattiuzzi conforms through her action program in “Só entro no jogo” what Audre Lorde points out as the possibility of transforming silence into language and action as an act of self-revelation, in which visibility is also the locus of strengthening. I add that the presence and representation of the black female body in her own terms of presence validates the self-determination of black agencies against colonialist agency, and the aesthetic space is configured as an important strategy of reinvention and reenactment of race, as well as gender and sexuality. To think about presence and representation is, above all, to break with imposed silences and regimes of compacted visibilities.