"Nós gatos já nascemos pobres": Poética da resiliência e do vestígio

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis investigates the artistic creation process triggered by the fortuitous encounter with street cats, proposing a theoretical and practical articulation between Fayga Ostrower’s concept of Significant Chance and Carl Gustav Jung’s Synchronicity. The main objective is to analyze the attentive walking and the appropriation of marginalized urban matter as a method for constructing a personal poetics of resilience and vestige. Characterized by an autoethnographic nature (Bogdan; Biklen, 1994; Lancri, 2002), the research assumes the author's biographical implication — activated by the memory of his youth and the awakening of the Survivor archetype — as the primary instrument of knowledge. The methodological path describes an ontological crisis of traditional pictorial representation, which culminated in a material turn towards the presentation of objects and debris collected in the urban space, in dialogue with the legacy of the ready-made (Wood, 2002) and Arte Povera (Celant, 1969). The theoretical scope is deepened by the phenomenological contributions of Gaston Bachelard (1996), Erwin Panofsky's iconology (2009), A. J. Greimas's plastic semiotics (2002), and Roland Barthes's concept of grain (1990). As a result, the study materializes in a body of work composed of four assemblages and installations, integrated into the immersive exhibition device called "The Cats' Room". This exhibition design subverts the institutional asepsis of the gallery's white cube through cardboard barricades, establishing a tactile environment of penumbra and tension. It is concluded that the attentive listening to the materiality of discarded items and the acceptance of an acausal order of reality are capable of dissolving the boundaries between life and work, merging human experience with animal exclusion. The research legitimizes the state of readiness and the collection of vestiges not only as creation methodologies, but as a radical gesture of empathy and an ethical statement on survival at the margins of the metropolis.