Black feminism and the sublime feeling in performance Merci Beaucoup, Blanco!

Abstract

This work presents a critic of the performance “Merci Beaucoup, Blanco!”, by Michelle Mattiuzzi, and the self-reflection on it published in the 32nd Biennial of São Paulo – “Uncertainty alive” (2016), entitled Written Performance Photography Experiment. To this end, we emphasize, besides the formal aspects of the performance event, aspects of the history of racist thought in Brazil and the official historiography concerning the black population in order to contextualize the feelings of pain and horror that permeate both the personal experience of the artist and her performance. Then, the elements of this performance that can incite feelings of pleasure in the observer are analyzed, such as the resistance of the black woman and her political representation in the field of art and culture. Finally, in order to conclude the possibilities for the fruition of the work in question, we take as reference, besides the artist's text, certain constituent arguments of the concept of the feeling of the sublime, as presented by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant e Jean-François Lyotard.