Maria Eugenia Matricardi is a visual artist and a Doctorate student in Contemporary Poetics at the University of Brasília – UnB. She lives in the highlands of Brazilian state power and belongs to the art collective Corpos Informáticos, featured on SPW Sexuality&Art on January 2016.
In 2013, at the event Body and Politics, organized by Corpos Informáticos, Matricardi’s performed Body against Concept, a vital exercise of embodied female nakedness, strength and resistance against the massive flow of a water canon, having Brasilia’s monumental axis at its backdrop. In her own words:
I take out my cloth, I place myself naked with my back facing the external museum’s wall. I ask the men to turn the pressure in the hose to its highest level. The body intimates the water flux and establishes a place of combat. The water outflow compresses, deforms the flesh: surface against surface, a space of incidence upon which things happen in their materiality, as a function in relation of their limit in relation to the space. Contraposition: to being against as a way of engendering with-tact (com-tato), creating adherence zones. Body against the concept. Concept against Concept. Body against body. The vulnerability of allowing it to flow, to let the body vibrate against the organism. Water skin, flux skin, air skin, almost nothing, a puddle on the ground.
As made explicit by the artist herself in the text Body against Concept the poetics of the performance extrapolates the facile symbolism of political violence and resistance that it inevitably projects. Even so, Matricardi’s powerful piece of body art has been chosen because it is iconic of Brazilian political atmosphere in July 2016.