Bodies that profane: Artistic productions and modes of existence in the informal sarau

Abstract

This article analyzes the relations between the artistic productions of the informal sarau, an aesthetic apparatus created within a university, the logics of the institution, and the production of bodily modes of existence. It constitutes a segment of a cartographic research-intervention whose corpus gathers productions made public on social media and treated as public-domain documents. The notions of apparatus, profanation, corpography, and group processes are mobilized to examine how the sarau deactivates captured uses of university space and restores other possibilities to the body. The analysis of three productions revealed an apparatus made in the collective, a body that embodies the word, and the emergence of voice in a body silenced as a woman. The article concluded that the sarau strains the disciplinary logic of the university, articulating gender, sexuality, and group life.