Dentro e fora são o mesmo lugar: videoarte como investigação autoetnográfica de uma mulher

Abstract

This graduation project presents the video art piece INSIDE AND OUTSIDE ARE THE SAME PLACE (2025) based on the concept ofthe “artist’s text” , as proposed by Rosana Paulino (2011), in which writing functions as an extension of the artistic practice itself. Fromthis perspective, the text does not function as a simple record or explanation of the work, but as a space for elaboration, traversedby processes, affections, and reflections that emerge from the artistic practice. The research adopts the autoethnographic methodas its theoretical and methodological foundation, understanding it not merely as a self-narrative, but as a critical practice that re-inscribes personal experiences traversed by social, historical, and symbolic structures (ELLIS; ADAMS; BOCHNER, 2011). Here,autoethnography allows us to explore the boundaries between individual experience and collectivity, developing a poeticinvestigation centered on the female body and the power relations that constitute it: the violence, norms, and silences that shapeits possibilities of existence. The video art interweaves personal records, reappropriations of archival material, and “testimonialperformances” , a concept developed by Geovanni Lima (2025) that understands performative action as embodied expression,grounded in bodily memory. These elements compose a narrative that raises the question: what does it mean to grow up as awoman? By bringing together childhood, adolescence, and adulthood through the lens of Leda Maria Martins’s (2021) “spiral time” ,in which past, present, and future do not succeed one another linearly as Western logic proposes, but rather intertwine, the workexplores transitions between inside and outside, the intimate and the collective, memory and fiction. The discussion extends to therelationships between body and image, analyzing how the female body is historically represented, disciplined, and produced as asocial category, in dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Susan Bordo (1997). It also establishes dialogues with works byfemale artists who explore themes of femininity, subjectivity, and regimes of visuality, such as Fernanda Magalhães, Dara Birnbaum,and Pipilotti Rist. From an anti-colonial and intersectional perspective, the memorial highlights normative structures and symbolicviolence that shape the experience of dissident bodies, considering how gender and sexuality influence ways of existing, narrating,and producing. At the same time, it affirms the power of the artist’s text as a situated form of thought, in which writing and practiceintertwine in the production of sensitive knowledge. At the intersection of theory and creation, the memorial constructs a spacewhere memories take shape, affects become form, and the artist can elaborate, perform, and reinvent her own trajectory.