Casulo: entre a performance e a escultura

Abstract

This work constitutes a hybrid artistic practice bridging performance and sculpture, utilizing low-cost materials—primarily plaster. It establishes a ritualistic process involving the application of plaster-soaked fabric directly onto a living body lying down; the body's presence defines the work's ephemeral dimension, characteristic of performance art. The resulting form—preserved solely through photography—visually evokes the image of unhoused individuals wrapped in blankets, thereby using art to critique the normalization of urban violence and the policies of abandonment that structure life in urban environments. The work engages with Byung-Chul Han’s discourse on the microphysics of contemporary violence—characterized as internalized, silent, and capillary, and as a structural phenomenon of modernity—while creating a tension between the viewer, the vulnerable body, and the ritual act.