Immund Poses: funk, photography, gender performativity and dance in the construction of the contemporary photographic portrait

Poses Imundas: funk, photographie, performativité de genre et danse dans la construction du portrait photographique contemporain

Abstract:

As a phenomenon, funk is wider than its specificities as a musical genre. The cultural space it occupies highlights issues related to the body, gender, race and social classes as sociopolitical aspects in constant friction with elite culture and the media, which absorb it and attempt to sanitize it. If something needs to be sanitized through the erasure of social and racial traits of funk singers and dancers, it is because this condition is seen as abject - immund. This article makes use of the concept of immund to analyze the black and LGBT body within the funk universe by examining the portraits of six young men in light of theoretical reflections derived from the fields of dance, performance art and politics.

Keywords:
Funk; Photography; Performance; LGBT; Dance

Résumé:

Le Funk est un phénomène plus ample que ses spécificités en tant que genre musical. L’espace culturel qu’il occupe met en évidence des questions concernant le corps, le genre, la race et les classes sociales. Son côté sociopolitique se frotte constamment avec la culture des élites et des médias, qui le pénètrent en essayant de le nettoyer, comme s’il était abject et imundo. Cet article s’approprie le concept d’impureté pour analyser le corps noir et LGBT dans l’univers du Funk. En examinant les portraits de six hommes, on propose une méthodologie d’analyse et de réflexion basée sur les théories de la dance, de la performance art et de la politique.

Mots-clés:
Funk; Photographie; Performance; LGBT; Danse

Resumo:

O fenômeno do Funk é mais amplo do que as suas especificidades como gênero musical. O lugar cultural por ele ocupado coloca em evidência questões relativas ao corpo, gênero, raça e classe social como conteúdos sociopolíticos em constante fricção com a cultura da elite e das mídias, que o absorvem e buscam higienizá-lo. Entende-se que se algo deve ser higienizado pelo apagamento dos traços sociais e raciais dos funkeiros é porque essa condição é entendida como abjeta - imunda. Parte-se aqui do conceito de imundo para tratar do corpo negro e LGBT no universo do Funk por meio do portrait de seis rapazes tendo como suporte teórico reflexões do campo da dança, da performance art e da política.

Palavras-chave:
Funk; Fotografia; Performance; LGBT; Dança

Once in contact with funk, we perceive it as a musical genre whose specificities surpass rhythm, lyrics and composition. Funk reveals sociopolitical aspects which make visible voices that expand and bodies that expose their ethos.

In this context, issues of race, gender and social class break out as performative markers that affirm a popular culture form of expression which is not only insubordinate to the elite, but also challenges it and promotes friction producing new modes of interaction and conflict.

Thus, funk reveals bodies that break through ghetto frontiers both because it dilutes the centers of information, through means of communication that speak of everyone to everyone, and because its physical circulation is not reduced to a single place in a city as demarcated into territories as Rio de Janeiro.

In the present study we will consider the creation of portraits of six young men who come from different regions in Rio de Janeiro, and reflect on the artistic creation in a discussion that touches upon issues such as acts of language, gender performance by black and LGBT people and the phenomenon of contemporary art when connected to mass popular musical manifestations such as funk.

The theoretical framework in this study interweaves rhythm and body, as well as the fields of dance, visual art and performance art. The understanding of the relationships between choreography and politics, such as expressed in dance theories by André Lepecki (2003; 2005; 2011; 2012), allowed us to reflect especially on the relationships between dance and the portrait. In this sense, the photographic work that was created and is presented here aimed at producing enunciations about the black and LGBT body that circulates relentlessly without avoiding conflict.

Thus, the desire to reflect upon such phenomena presupposes certain understandings: (a) the power that dance holds in diasporic cultures; b) the adherence that dance finds amongst the interlocutors of this research as part of the black and LGBT population; (c) the possibility of regarding a pose in a photographic portrait in constant analogy with dance, both traversed by the idea of choreography - so as to also create images in which the act of posing itself is presented as an artistic performance.

With this in mind and having looked at mass popular culture through the theme of funk, a photographic work entitled Immund Poses was structured, which consequently discusses the contemporary portrait.

The title itself already points in certain directions for us to reflect upon the creation of the photographic work. It had as a framework aspects expressed through funk - the bodies that move to a syncopated beat, the lyrics and impertinent catchphrases that come out of the ghettoes in search of legitimacy -, as well as its marginalization.

The image of funk with its lyrics and narratives shock the elite as it invades such territories. Dialectically, the occupation of this space and the rupture of borders has resulted in sanitizing processes of the cultural agents that promote such musical genre, be it in the elimination of dirty words from the lyrics, be it in the transformation of the bodies that suffer interventions in dress codes, hairstyles and behavior to such an extent as to promote physical changes that aim at hiding physical racial markers. If the elite and the media understand that something needs to be sanitized, it is because they recognize in it something dirty. The concept of dirtiness, or that of being immund, will be instrumental here because it allows us to identify the way through which rhythm, as a social and musical phenomenon, challenges instances of power in its legitimation process.

In order to better understand the conceptual power of this term, we searched for its etymological root. According to the Houaiss dictionary (2019), the word immund has its origins in the Latin term immundus, which means dirty or impure. The formulation im- + mundus indicates that which is external to the world.

There is an understanding that the term has its origin in the founding myth of Roman cities. Apparently, there was a central point from which all that urban configurations spread, constituting an origin, a starting point, in which special places such as the emperor’s palace, known as mundus, were important.

In short, the underlying idea is both archaic and widely disseminated: from a center, the four horizons are projected towards the four cardinal directions. The Roman mundus was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for the human habitation. It has been rightly proposed that Roma quadrata is to be understood not as being square in shape but as being divided into four parts. The mundus was clearly matched to the omphalos, to the navel of the Earth; the City (Urbs) was situated in the middle of the orbisterrarum (Eliade, 1992, p. 29).

The founding myth of ancient cities included a certain ritual that was undertaken in order to find an ideal place in a specific territory and then attribute relevance to this central location. That is where the center of the city would be constructed. What was once simply a random space would become a singular place, a unique place from which to organize the beginning.

Thus, a Roman city would be delimited with this chosen place as the center. Later, walls would be erected in order to offer protection to the living. Cemeteries, dead bodies and other dejects were not allowed in the city. Establishing what belonged inside the mundus also meant establishing what should be kept outside its walls.

Considering the etymological meaning of the term, a radical dichotomy between the inside and the outside can be seen. Inside is recognized as pure and outside as dirty. Thus, the prefix im- indicates that which is the opposite to mundus. Dejects, abjectness and impurities should not come close to the origin, sacredness and center of the world. We thus notice that the term immund indicates abjectness and at the same time reveals the elite’s effort to attribute this abjectness in the world, in its world, even if a dirty one.

In this aspect, the term immund seems to split into two extremes. However, it is interesting to observe when the idea of abjectness is perturbed by a great crystallization of its meanings - such as the idea of masculine and feminine, an important issue in our analysis. Let us consider now the example of Herculine Bardin¹, a French hermaphrodite from the 19th century.

Herculine was assigned the sex of ‘female’ at birth. In h/er early twenties, after a series of confessions to doctors and priests, s/he was legally compelled to change her sex to ‘male’ […] along with the medical and legal documents that discuss the basis on which the designation of h/her true “sex” was decided (Butler, 2017, p. 165).

The examples of blurring the ideas that crystalize into binary extremes are many. The purpose here is to go beyond the etymological meaning of the term immund and the dichotomies of the mundus myth, in such socially solid antagonisms as the masculine/feminine pair. Butler’s (2017) perspective emphasizes the discussion of body acts that intend on subverting these extremes, in order for us to connect with the themes that make themselves present.

The existence of an intersexual being questions the juridical and medical power conventions that regulate and crystalize what is allowed for masculine e feminine sexual categories. These sanctions, the law of discourse, distinguish the speakable from the unspeakable, circumscribing what is legitimate from that which is illegitimate (Butler, 2017, p. 120).

The author, in her reading of Foucault, highlights what he says about Herculine when he understands that sex unifies body functions and meanings and the existence of a hermaphrodite can dilute the meanings given to sexual organs by discursive laws. This way, it would be possible for this subject to create pleasures outside of the intelligibility context imposed by single sexes in binary relationships (Butler, 2017, p. 169).

S/he is both male and female, for since early childhood s/he claims to differ from other girls. According to Butler (2017, p. 170), “this difference is a cause for alternating states of anxiety and self-importance”, as the narrative in h/er diaries reveals.

S/he herself presumes at various points that h/er body is the cause of h/er gender confusion and h/er transgressive pleasures, as if they were both result and manifestation of an essence which somehow falls outside the natural/metaphysical order of things. But rather than understand h/er anomalous body as the cause of h/er desire, h/er trouble, h/er affairs and confession, we might read this body, here fully textualized, as a sign of an irresolvable ambivalence produced by the juridical discourse on univocal sex. In the place of univocity, we fail to discover multiplicity […] (Butler, 2017, p. 173).

Herculine, due to judicial orders, was transformed into Alexia, a name with an interesting feminine suffix, as Butler (2017) points out. It was imposed male documents and clothes on her. Before the observance of the law by judicial and medical institutions, we reach a point in which the regulation of h/er abnormality turns into a place of existence in h/er speech, becoming something while also being something else. Butler (2017, p. 181) highlights such fact when describing the scornful laugh s/he displays towards the doctor that wrote the conclusive evaluations on her/his uncomprehended condition, as well as h/er scornful laughter before the possibility of accepting such imposition.

For Herculine, then, laughter appears to designate either humiliation or scorn, two positions unambiguously related to a damning law, subjected to it either as its instrument or object. Herculine does not fall outside the jurisdiction of that law; even h/er exile is understood on the model of punishment. On the very first page, s/he reports that h/er place was not marked out [pas marquée] in this world that shunned me. And s/he articulates the early sense of abjection that later is enacted first as a devoted daughter or lover to be likened to a dog or slave and then finally in a full and fatal form as s/he is expelled and expels h/erself from the domain of all human beings. From this presuicidal isolation, s/he claims to soar above both sexes, but h/er anger is most fully directed against men, whose title s/he sought to usurp in her intimacy with Sara and whom s/he now indicts without restraint as those who somehow forbid h/er the possibility of love (Butler, 2017, p. 181, emphasis added)².

It is in h/er diaries that she expresses the meanings that s/he attributes to h/er abjection, oscillating between negative and positive narcissism, declaring h/erself the most neglected and charming creature, and highlighting h/er difficulties in dealing with a non-category: “[...] one who is, for all women, better than any man” (apud Butler, 2017, p. 183). H/er scornful laugh is directed towards men and their laws.

H/er anomalous condition, considered abject by judicial and medical laws, appears in her diaries as subversive folds that refuse extremes in determination and the necessity of exactness. The law does not constitute a mere cultural imposition but generates a conformation to the notion of nature itself, creating binary asymmetries in order to transform corporal anatomies into symbolic structures that must be assimilated.

Therefore, what is abject, anomalous, can also be regarded as a place for existence and expurgation of the law, or at least a means through which to challenge it. In her discussion of this case, we believe that Butler (2017) produces a critique of Foucault’s perspective by understanding that Herculine, once transformed into Alexia, pointed to a place to exist with h/er angst, without closing one’s eyes and without idealizing a beautiful non-place, but assuming the possibility of existing through abjection. It is through this perspective that we propose to reflect upon the abjection that the term immund can allude to, assuming a reflection that points out the existence of something that is in constant transit, existing more in-between than in the extremes.

The in-between is very important in the world of funk, although it rarely comes up in the everyday perspectives on the rhythm. The body of the funk singer/dancer is situated in a very extreme universe of constant abjection, be it because of the bodily performances of men and women, be it because of the gender expressions that go beyond the binary extremes, presenting a mixture of infinite possibilities. This can be seen in the clothing, in the hairstyles, in the lyrics, in the speech, in the specific beat that can be heard - and, of course, that which concerns us here: in the images, which in this research are seen as catalysts of these characteristics.

The concept of immund will allow us an approach that will follow a trail similar to that of the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, although it does not constitute the focus of this work. Authors such as Nestor García Canclini (2006) and Jesus Martin-Barbero (2009) establish dialogues about the plural meaning of the idea of popular culture and media, as currently proposed by Omar Rincon (2016) with the idea of bastard cultures, when analyzing its relationships with mass culture. Such perspective allows the popular to be observed in its narrative, sentimental and bodily expressive richness (Rincon, 2016, p. 29).

This is a notion of the popular that touches upon a public experience that jeopardizes the subject as a totality, seen neither pure nor virtuous, overstepping oppositions and highlighting that which allows for nuances to be seen. The notion of popular that we aim at discussing alongside the concept of immund resonates with Rincon’s affirmation (2016, p. 31): “The popular is a lot of things at the same time: the popular allows for an existence that surpasses that of a pure and hygienic one, it is a bastard experience”.

We are therefore interested in the immund forms through which the inscriptions that transform the funk singer/dancers’ bodies into image and which challenge the hegemonic power institutions, as well as the ways through which such consolidated and dominant power treat these cultural agents. We understand that funk reveals itself as a bastard (Rincon, 2016) and disruptive element - immund -, that is articulated through actions and various modes of expression that shock and insult, that reveal particular ethical behaviors that are a part of a certain way of living that insults the elite because of its dirtiness, its power to make language, spaces, acronyms, music, bodies and art immund. Such dirtiness, however, is rampant and reveals fissures in the hegemonic field that result from the actions of singing and dancing by poor and black segments of the population.

The question derived from these issues is how to portray these dancing bodies through image without simply portraying static dance movements, or simply photographing dancing routines. The intention was to formulate an image of funk that could reveal its immund characteristics. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to articulate the pose in a portrait as a tool that would allow us to reflect upon the representations of black LGBT bodies in the sociocultural context at hand.

Many definitions and redefinitions can be discussed in order to reflect upon the portrait artistic genre. We identify an abundance of texts in the second half of the 19th century, such as the French photographic manuals, especially that of the photographer Eugene Disdéri (1819-1889), on the artistic process of portrait creation. The manuals pointed to a pattern of representation of the act of creation in which model and photographer are in front of each other.

To go back to these reflections from more than a century ago about the pose means to transpose these issues to contemporary photography, making its relevance obvious. With the current technological developments, to reflect upon the pose means to attribute importance to the potent way through which the dispositives can operate.

In order to better understand this process and link it to the issues connected to the portrait and the model-photographer relationship, we will seek to, in the following discussion, understand the notions of body, movement and choreography as proposed by the reflections of André Lepecki (2011). We will thereon find references in the funk ethnography by Hermano Vianna (1987) and observe possible agency that gender performances (Butler, 2017) can allow us on gender, class and racial markers as proposed by França, Macedo e Simões (2010).

Studies on funk have been increasingly involving a multiplicity of voices, both amongst the agent of voices within the funk music market and amongst intellectuals and militants of the field of culture. Thus, the music genre has been receiving a rich multiperspectivism, traversed by dense problematizations. Lopes (2010, p. 16) points out that the carioca funk (that which is from Rio de Janeiro) cannot be understood only as music or as an expression, but as a way of looking at the world, which reveals itself as a mode of expressing ways of feeling and perceiving.

We should thus consider the mode of operation in the creation of the portraits in such context. The circumstances call for care and caution in order to reflect upon funk images, which have been considered criminal by the police. In a dialogue with Stuart Hall (1997), Lopes (2010, p. 111) shows that race has mutable meanings that are intrinsically related to the forms of exclusion of certain subjects from the modern world. Such segregating behavior, promoted by the State, was demonstrated towards other Black diaspora cultural manifestations, ignoring the form of life that is part of life today, according to Lopes (2010, p. 174):

Throughout my field research, I observed that the carioca funk, more than entertainment, work, identity and communication for youth from the periphery and the favelas, is also a form of literacy typical of African diaspora and, thus, of popular culture which is present in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, in which music, dance and style hold a central place. In the interior of this musical practice, uncountable oral and written texts are disseminated, of which the youth from favelas are authors, through which they structure and give meaning to themselves and the carioca funk world (Lopes, 2010, p. 174).

In its totality as sound, rhythm and language, the funk phenomenon has a lot of adherence in these communities. Lopes (2010) calls attention to the reflections on its written forms. The author also points to the privilege of writing in comparison with oral traditions that do not dominate the formality of literacy, which excludes other possibilities of understanding cultures in conditions of subalternity, such as the oralitures (Martins, 2006), which emphasize the black body as a locus of inscription of various types of knowledge.

It is necessary to think writing and reading beyond the extremes of literacy and non-literacy or let them be immund in relation to each other. This means ceasing to oppose hegemonic forms of writing - which are schooled and, this way, are recognized as the only symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1989), in the form of an indication of development or intelligence - to the writing and texts that are produced and circulate outside institutions of privilege (Lopes, 2010, pp. 175-176).

Taking this problematic into account, the role of the body, as well as the processes and the apparatus that make possible forms of registering it, is crucial to this debate. It also becomes a mode of proposing writings outside of texts and write a certain culture, once it is difficult to think about funk without considering everything that constitutes it along with its battles.

This is made evident in the portrait and in the oralitures which, during the photographic process, became evident. The writing proposed by the portrait transfers to the image components that reveal a lot about the life and the confrontations that such bodies face and challenge. They make evident the traces that indicate the abjection created by hegemonic perspectives, that are excluding and derogatory, resituating them and assigning new meanings to them.

Image 1
Immund Poses. Portrait of Lucca Machado

Adriana Lopes (2010, p. 123; p. 169) reminds us that “[...] the language that subalternizes and stigmatizes certain subjects gives them, paradoxically, a public form of existence and even strategies of resistance”. This way, the production of images that were created in the essay Immund Poses intends to present various funk aesthetics that are able to reveal a combination of black and LGBT persons, giving them one more place for representativity (Image 1).

Moreover, another central issue for this research was the perception that in the body and lives of the models dance is a place for expression and speech. This way, it became clear the need of studying forms of non-institutionalized dance, as well as how the notions of choreography and dance, as analyzed by Lepecki, are aligned in a relevant way for the process of the construction of the portrait in the contemporaneity and that makes it possible to understand the ground where model and photographer choreograph themselves.

Lepecki (2011) recalls the notion of “artistic object” by Rancière, situating it in the context of distribution - “[...] the distribution of the sensible, sayable, visible and invisible” that can activate “new collective modes of enunciation” (Rancière apud Lepecki, 2010, p. 173). The author intends to, this way, engender new modes of life and subjectivation, offering various metabolisms to art. Lepecki (2011, p. 43) presents the concept of “dissent” - a term that Rancière uses to understand the new aesthetic regimes of art - as the center of the aesthetic regime, for it is the link between art and politics.

This center has a dynamics; it is dynamic, kinetic in itself, in the sense that disagreement produces a rupture in habits and behaviors, and provokes this way the disappearance of all sorts of clichés: sensorial, of desire, value, behavior, clichés that make life and its affects poorer (Lepecki, 2011, p. 44).

Lepecki points to the fusion between art and politics in a single binomial, “art-politics”, in order to claim that the gestural formations of movement and choreography are not neutral and need to be perturbed, for the perception of these kinetics must not be comprehended as naturally pre-existent (Lepecki, 2011, p. 44). It is thus understood that dance, while danced “[...] in the moment that it is incorporated in the world of human actions, inevitably theorizes its social context through this act” (Lepecki, 2011, p. 45). Dance, in its immanent capacity of reflecting upon the context from which it emerges, can offer funk an important point of observation; it is not a theoretical abstraction, but an understanding of the relationship that the bodies establish with their places.

If, according to Lepecki (2011), the social markers that traverse us - such as race, gender and class - are lines of force for dance, a similar disposition can be adopted to reflect upon choreography and apply it to the pose in portraits. To conduct such theoretical constructs from the field of dance to the construction of the pose is a perception that happens in the materiality of the act of photographing itself, in the moment in which the bodies are before the camera and interacting, that is, choreographed.

Lepecki’s (2011) expanded notion of choreography, that goes beyond the limits of dance, can help us formulate a critique of contemporary art in relation to the construction of the poses:

[...] the formations of the choreographic are multiple. And they expand well beyond the restricted field of dance. For me, such an expansion of the choreographic field has an unavoidable consequence: the understanding of dance as choreopolitics (Lepecki, 2011, p. 47).

To face this multiplicity of choreographic conformations outside the field of dance constitutes a dislocation of meaning which is a part of the dilutions and appropriations of supports produced in contemporary art, in which both the materials and the crisscrossing of languages are inherent to this artistic practice. Choreopolitics appears as a powerful analytical instrument for this research, since it allows us to think about the body that dances funk and their interlocutors without pulling them away from their ground. The “ground” is where the co-formation of diverse elements occur, “[...] an acute perception of the physical particularities of all the elements in a given situation” (Paul apud Lepecki, 2011, p. 47). These particularities come together in the so-called plane of composition, which composes the relationship of the body with this ground that, for the author, means the ground itself where history unravels.

In other words, the act of posing for a photographer, when seen through this choreopolitical perspective, considers the previous history that makes the bodies through aesthetic and political relationships. The intention of producing dissent can make visible that which is presented, although invisible, and can try to put into practice the distribution of the sensible.

It is important to highlight the desire to circulate beyond the consensual movement agreements to which, generally, the LGBT person from the periphery is subjected. It is also important to remember that, while police shots framed MCs in criminal poses, photographers Danielle Dacorso and Vincent Rosenblatt³, starting from an art/politics dissent, choreographed other poses in their portraits, allowing more nuanced perspectives, without avoiding the immund qualities, and at the same time requalifying and revaluing funk in its condition of a place of speech.

These works were born in the funk balls and bring with them the force of the moment when they were taken, the involvement with the music in its places of origin. These images gave funk and, consequently, its ground, a new face. The essay produced in this research was done within the specific performativities of the portrait and searches for its ground in a particular way, centered on the idea of the plane of composition.

Contemporary dance, as a way to produce art, has as its plane of composition elements such as the ground, the body, the movement, the energy, the pleasure and so on. This way, there are many possible planes, and Lepecki (2012) presents seven of them and claims that the mixture of these different planes determines eventual movement politics and lines of force, that are interrelated in the metafield in that serves as agency, that is, dance. From these planes of composition, we will highlight three that present pathways for this study.

The first plane, called introductory, has to do with the tentative mediation of writing and movement through a piece of paper and the ground. For the author, it is a fantasy to regard the ground of dance as a white, neutral, smooth space that tries to neutralize the space in a violent manner, constituting this way for dance a kind of politics of the ground. Lepecki (2012) criticizes the naturalization of the movements of dance, as if these were exempt from history, in an attempt to neutralize the ground and leave it smooth, devoid of bumps and slip-provoking irregular formation.

Lepecki’s perspective (2012) is instigating since the control of variables is also a theme in photography, especially when, in the 19th century, photographic studio accessories had as an objective the freezing of the pose through the use of metal structures, that immobilized the bodies for long expositions. At that time, many manuals instructed on how to produce a good pose. French photographer Eugène Disdéri (1819-1889) offers advice for the production of an adequate portrait, pointing out in his The Art of Photography, from 1862, that we “should faithfully reproduce the individual” (Disdéri apud Bastos, 2007, p. 56). In general, in the manuals from this period, the goal was the final result, in which the group of elements, that is, the convergence of attire, ambience, objects, infinite backgrounds, necessary lighting and type of lighting, culminated in the success of a good portrait. The closeness of the manuals from this period and the concept of composition plane illustrates the pairing of dance and pose, as if both could be codified in paper.

In order to reflect on this issue, we will highlight the second plane of composition pointed out by Lepecki (2012), the plane of movement. Throughout history, dance has been captured by bureaucratic-representative and even State regimes. For example, some manuals regulated the form of doing the early exercises for military marches, as well as other disciplined, disciplinary and organizing apparatus highlighted in the plane of movement.

Presently, the records that regulate movement, both in dance and photography, are pulverized - which can be seen in the tutorials found on the Internet. Different videos on YouTube regulate the way of dancing and moving to the sound of funk, for example. As for the poses, fashion tutorials, especially, also serve that function. The medium that at once captures and disseminates multiple ways of moving offers today a great number of possibilities, some of which are instigating and some of which are impotent. An emblematic case of this political-kinetic dimension is the documentary Paris is burning (1991), about the gender expressions of black LGBT people from the periphery of New York between the 1980s and the 1990s (Image 2).

Image 2
Poster of the 1991 film, Paris is burning

The film narrates the informal drags queen contests that took place in the most affluent clubs of the city. It is possible to perceive that the gender expressions manifested in the choreographies are traced against the lines of force, class and race.

In a sociocultural environment (New York, 1980) in which the heterosexuals and whites could do everything while gays had to control the clothing they wore, what they said and how they behaved, ball culture created spaces in which participants could be whatever they wanted, show their elegance, seduction, beauty, talents and knowledge (Berte, 2014, p. 70).

The movie presents the drag culture, whose characters, with no access to the glamour of the luxurious attire displayed on the famous fashion magazine Vogue, make fun of their good taste by creating a style of dancing known as vogue, making stylized body movements as poses that reproduce the editorials of the fashion world. It is a sort of a declared coming together of pose and dance.

The dance mixes pantomime, gestures that copy someone putting make-up, break movements, workout movements, ancient Egypt hieroglyphs, the runway and magazine poses, articulating sinuous or straight body lines and flamboyant positions (Berte, 2014, p. 70).

Also, in 1990, Madonna launches Vogue, one of her most popular songs, in which she invites the listener to strike a pose (Image 3). Even if the pop star was influenced by marginal references, the media and spectacular appropriation of the style conserved little of its contesting tone; on the contrary, imprisoned it, making it impermeable to its initial critique of consumer society, or that mode of consuming, sanitizing the immund movements. The attire and contesting body movements that made fun of heterosexual and white good taste were softened and re-elaborated. In Madonna’s music video, the bodies are enveloped in a Hollywood atmosphere that propagates the vogue style taking it to millions of fans worldwide.

Image 3
Willi Ninja, choreographer of House of Ninja. Vogue dance pose

The abrupt body movements generated by vogue started to resonate with the talented expertise of professional dancers. In other words, the movements that have a contesting origin promote a political challenge with its kinetics - on one hand, they find movements that are typical of a subalternized gender expression; on the other, the same movements, or almost the same, though with new agents, dancers of contemporary dance, Madonna herself and the means of production, in its most popular representation - the music video -, do not resemble at all that of the LGBT people who originated such movements. Thus, the class and race strata of this other vogue is striking.

In order to better understand this mechanism, let’s go back to Lepecki (2012, p. 17), who affirms that “[...] the dancer and choreographer of his or her steps goes, or thinks he or she goes, wherever they want”, in a certain way, this also reflects the subjects misappropriated from their own movements. Thus, the author reflects:

A political-kinetic challenge for planes of composition in contemporary dance: what to do with the destiny of my movement? What to do with the idiotic subjectivity of the self-moving? How to give agency to movement and subjectivity in a way that the automobile onto-theological delusion can be left behind? […] the subject sees him/herself as self-moving only to see him/herself in an eternal traffic jam of his/her desire, in an obscene complicity before the awful pillaging of nature, in a passive witnessing of an insurmountable and sadistic neocolonial violence - all this to guarantee the fuel that will take him/her to the next traffic jam, as far as the topographers and his/her historical compression machines continue to work in order to make the rubber to slide without a single pull (Lepecki, 2012, p. 17).

The third plane of composition which will be of interest to us is the plane of return, repetition, difference or reenactment. Lepecki (2012) resorts to Foucault when he points out that movement is archived in the body. The archive, for Foucault, is not immutable, on the contrary, it is “[...] a dynamic system of formations and transformations of enunciations” (Foucault apud Lepecki, 2012, p. 19) that delimitates our being in the world. Thus, the body is the ideal model of such an archive, for “the body is errant, full of agency, precarious, inventive, desiring, fugitive of itself and mortal”. It is the notion of the body-archive, which gives form to and transforms itself and the enunciations that make and circumscribe it.

Such issues, that have to do with the expressive body force, which points to that which the body does, were important in order to deepen the issues discussed in this research and fundamental for the composition of images that could demonstrate what we have been naming immundnesses here.

Image 4
Behind the Funk: Jhury Nascimento warming up for a show in Madureira

Image 5
Show by Valesca at Espeto Carioca. Jhury in the back, to the left. Recreio dos Bandeirantes (RJ)

Six men, whose clothes, style and ways of moving reflected a striking and particular way of being in the world, especially in their gender and race performances, were selected for the photographic study (Image 4; Image 5). Such performativities and the desire to circulate through the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, which stood out because of specific visual qualities, besides representing a LGBT segment of the population, were a constant claim of being in the world.

As far as the body goes, the simple fact of being and existing in the world is in itself a political act, making the acronym LGBT more complex in the spaces where people that belong to this group circulate. In these grounds, the pathways always propose detours, as a response to the possibility of shooting, rocks, temporary groups for protection, including against the police, above all for those who have dark skin.

Under this perspective, dance, with its specific layers for the body, goes beyond the comprehension of being only a kinetic action. The idea of plane of composition conducts us to a body which is traversed by vectors of force, and able to actualize, interrogate, run, circulate and hide on the ground through which it passes.

In order to reflect on this body and the forces that traverse the ground of the funk population, we will search for the concepts of release and syncope employed respectively by Hermano Vianna (1987) and Muniz Sodré (1998). Both notions allow us to perceive in the body, be it collectively or individually, kinetic oscillations that are somewhat similar.

Hermano Vianna, prior to 1990, explored the first funk dance parties. The anthropologist produced dense descriptions about the way the body moves and about the music’s capacity to regulate those spaces with different intensities. Vianna accounts:

In the funk dance we do not find ‘refined’ movements of language and eyes, but simultaneous and identical steps. The sensation is that of standing before a single creature, with hundreds of arms, hundreds of legs, hundreds of heads (1987, p. 97).

Here it would be difficult to assume that the lyrics of the songs that spoke of a funk mass were meant to name this sensation; but it is possible to understand, through Vianna (1987), that funk is something that pushes the limits of sanity conventions. The body pushes forth, slides, moves on the ground and towards the ground in order to dance funk. It is a body of intense and frenetic celebration. Vianna points out that:

The party is about excess, in all senses, in order to not make sense. The sound is really loud, the contrast between the lights that flash non-stop and the almost dominant darkness, the dances increasingly more intense, the shout of satisfaction, the always present threat of violence. The party is insanity, an inconsequent and irresponsible affirmation that life is worth living (1987, p. 140).

The description resembles the festive manifestations that are frequent in the African diaspora, that are materialized in the black body. Sodré (1998, p. 11) recalls the notion of the syncope, a component of black music that provokes a rhythmic void, a type of “missing beat”. For the music, the “syncope” in music is the absence of the counting of time: a weak beat that invokes another time, a strong beat that is a sine qua non characteristic of samba and jazz, for example. Sodré explains that “[...] in fact, both in jazz as in samba, the syncope has a special effect inciting the listener to fill the empty time with a mark of the body - clapping, waving, swinging, dance”. Body gestures are magnetized by the force of impulse provoked by the rhythm (Image 6).

Image 6
The force of rhythm in the photographs. Angola steps

Bastard and subordinate popular culture manifestations over the past decades - hip-hop, funk, soul, among others - keep a certain historical continuity with this phenomenon. Like other singular logics, narratives and languages that allow other subjectivities to be known (Rincon, 2016, p. 35), such as dance, movement and body.

The body that responds to the syncope of samba is the same one that slavery attempted to culturally violate and repress in the Brazilian history: the black body. Its integration with music, through dance, was already evident in the Palmares Quilombo: ‘Being the sentinels already set, they prolong their dances until late at night and beat the ground so noisily that it can be heard from afar’. And the choreography of samba was quite evident: ‘Usually, next to the crude orchestra, the dancers gather in a circle and, singing and clapping, make up a chorus and the accompaniment. In the center of the circle, each dancer present takes turns dancing. And these, once finished, with a simple wave or violent shove, invite the others to replace him/her (sic). Sometimes, the whole circle takes part in the dance, in line, nonstop, following the beat of the music with rhythmic contortions of arms and bodies (Sodré, 1998, p. 11-12).

When he noticed this kinetic force in the funk parties (Image 7), Vianna (1987) found a notion derived from religious rituals, in an attempt to understand how rhythm is able to move hundreds of bodies. The musical beat allowed him to understand that it can “produce release”. In the funk balls, this is the moment of maximum density: “[...] there is practically no space between people, the bodies press against each other, and each person is as close to the other as one is to one’s self” (Canetti apud Vianna, 1987, p. 28).

We should understand this release as a sound intensity that vibrates and extends itself to the collective movement of the bodies. Although it holds a conceptual approximation with the syncope, the term refers specifically to the electronic mixing found in funk, in which the ponto, an electronic base with no voice, is manipulated by the DJ with the intention of regulating the sound intensity.

Vianna (1987) tells that the DJs of the time needed to develop means of controlling and domesticating the funk mass of bodies, much like in religious cults, because of the excessive euphoria in the balls; consequently, an efficacious strategic form of regulation was found in dance.

Image 7
Groups of dancers and beginning of a fight in the Clube do Canto Ball, in Niterói (RJ)

To observe that the same frenzy still occurs (Image 8) more than thirty years later, and in different places and environments, suggests funk’s great power of release and its strong adherence in the spaces it occupies.

Image 8
Private show by Dennis DJ at a Bar Mitzvah in Parque Lage

Once we have come to grasp funk’s penetration and power over the bodies, we may resume the issue of the possibilities of photographing it, the issue of the pose and the expanded notion of choreography and planes of composition, besides, of course, the idea of “machine” (Flusser, 1985) or the profanations of the dispositive by Agamben (2009), which brings the reflection closer to the theoretical field of photography.

In order to think about photography today, it is instigating to recall Agamben’s (2009) use of the idea of dispositive - a term very much discussed by Foucault. According to Agamben, a dispositive is:

(a) A heterogenous, linguistic and non-linguistic compound that includes virtually anything under the same name: discourse, institutions, buildings, laws, police sanctions, philosophical propositions, etc. The dispositive in itself is the web that is established between these elements. (b) A dispositive has always a strategic and concrete function and is always inscribed in a power relationship. (c) As such, it results from the crisscrossing of relationships of power and relationships of knowledge (Agamben, 2009, p. 29).

The author proposes a dislocation of the original meaning of the Foucauldian term, resituating it and promoting a broadening of its comprehension. This, on the other hand, leads us to make use of Agamben’s (2009) comprehension of dispositive as a potent way to create, and from here on invoking to which he will call profanations:

[...] anything that has in any way the capacity to capture, guide, determine, intercept, model, control and secure gestures, behaviors, opinions and discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, the prisons, the asylums, the Panopticon, the schools, the confession booths, the factories, the disciplines, the judicial sanctions, etc.; whose connection with power is in a certain way evident, but also the pen, the writing, the literature, the philosophy, the agriculture, the cigarettes, the navigations, the computers, the cell phones and - why not - the language itself, which might be the most ancient dispositive (Agamben, 2009, p. 41).

With his perspective on dispositives Agamben (2009) proposes the dislocations of their customary uses, suggesting the creation of a one to one relationship, and thus having their uses profaned. To desecrate is a counter dispositive that calls for ways to make the body abandon its gentleness and submissiveness in order to create subjectivations.

It is also reasonable to bring to the discussion what Flusser (1985, p. 9) says about the “machine” as “toys that simulate a type of thinking”. The translating machine of conceptual thinking can be the act of photographing, being that the photographers can establish a duel, a one to one fight with the machine, leading to its deprograming.

This way, and in the example of funk photography, there is a more or less explicit confrontation between the image that artists hold of themselves and that which the media wants revealed. If we compare the editorials produced by Marcos Serra Lima and by Rodolfo Viana (Image 9), which belong to the same period, we can see aesthetic approaches that say a lot about the visual culture in which the funk dancer and the photographer meet. In these images, phenomena that sanitize in order to hide the immund qualities can be observed. In Image 9, left, the body is subjectified in a pose that disconnects the female dancer from her context of fame, resituating her in more erudite setting. Her hair lies on her shoulders, her posture is upright, and her face is stiff, the hands simulate playing the piano, but her feet are distant from the pedals. There is no intimacy between the subject in the image and the glamorous setting.

In Rodolfo Viana’s editorial (Image 9, right) there was no attempt to hide the expressive particularities of the singer’s body. Ludmilla, in her pose, holds on to a ladder, her hair is tied up, and the make-up does not include artifices to make her nose seem thinner.

Image 9
Ludmilla

In short, both photographers and models are subject to vigorous choreopolitics that may frame the subjects in a rigid manner, capable of preventing torsions, immund traits. In the perception of the production teams, any excess is seen as pure abjection. Even for those who, in this type of work, bypass the choreopolicing, there is an evident necessity of following the rules of consumerism that traverse relationships and suppress the legitimate expression of the artists.

It is precisely in this manner, and through the confrontation of this ideology, that it arose the desire of producing a photographic essay with people who, as far as their sexuality and deviant behavior in mostly heterosexual spaces, assumed deviant modes of behavior. Such performances became evident in suburban balls that allowed the production of dissent and the beginning of the artistic photographic work that generated the series entitled Behind-the-Funk (Image 10), as a way of bypassing and deprogramming the machine, rethinking the images of the places and the desire to approximate funk and the field of art.

Image 10
Behind-the-Funk series. Anitta and her fans and an improvised passinho competition

This experience revealed the need to choose models for the creation of a more thought-out process involving portraits. This way, it was possible to experiment freer ways of being in front of the models having a rare listening opportunity. The intention was to subjectify the photographer-model relationship and try to horizontalize the hierarchies of speech and choices of making the good photo or to capture the good pose imposed by the choreopolicing.

In order to achieve this, a more specific approximation was made with the artistic genre of the performance that collaborated to the development of this artistic materiality. The performer and theoretician Eleonora Fabião (2013, p. 4) elaborated a methodological incursion in which she calls the creation of a performance piece a “program”. According to Fabião (2013), “[...] the clearer and more concise the enunciation is - with no adjectives and no verbs in the infinitive - the more fluid the experimentation will be”.

Fabião’s (2013) proposition evolves within the making of the piece, it is action itself. Although Agamben (2009) provokes a rereading of the dispositive that also uses verbs in the infinitive indicating action, and Flusser (1985) talks about deprogramming the machine as a mobile motor of an artistic process, the modus operandi of Fabião’s program is able to connect the enunciations with the readers’ bodies.

From this theoretical framework, it was set an experimentation program according to which photos would only be made when the model was positioned within the limits of a square demarcated on the ground. The square, which could be drawn or positioned on the ground, to the sound of music, impels the model and the photographer to create a duet, a sort of dance, which is started up by the choreography of the photographic mise-en-scène.

From this conceptual fusion of performance art and photography theories we are able to work on what we will call performative program machine, a way of experiencing these languages in a hybrid manner.

The idea is problematized from the ground where the model-photographer duet takes place in the studio. This means to understand how these bodies, which are subjected to multiple lines of force, are juxtaposed and mutually influenced. The plane of composition illuminates the choreopolitical contours of the relationships established between these actors. This way, the choreography, both the model’s and the photographer’s, emerges as a result of a process beyond movement itself and that constitutes a political act. This rearrangement intends on generating a poetics and in a strategic way produces poses in the photographic portrait that may reveal a photography that challenges the visual stigmas activated in the gender, class and race markers.

This way, the choreopolicing of photographic sets are bypassed and made explicit once we refuse that which the machine or the dispositive demands of the photographer. Such mechanism generates deprogramming, subjectivation and counter dispositives which bothers the ways of enunciating the bodies in the set and makes visible their oralitures in images and events in order for them to exist as immund poses.

The languages of performance art and the portrait genre in this research find in the performative program machine the agency that leads to the pose. The attire and the visual indexes of the men’s bodies, the music chosen, the dance and the moment in which the dancer enters the square and makes a pose, make concrete in the portrait an emblematic element, in which this coming together of languages reveals the immund characteristics that we search for.

Image 11
Video frame: photographer-model duo and portrait of Jhury

For such, it is necessary to worry about the production of the pose beyond the aesthetics of the static and use the possible materialities and artifices in this expanded studio - we refer to the transit between artistic languages, as well as its supports, the relationship of the artist with an ethnographic incursion⁴ or everything that is potent - for the creation of portraits before the dispositives that pertain to this experiment. Again, the expanded choreography that creates lines of force to create a plane of composition magnetizes the artistic materials.

In the field process formulated from this expanded studio, this co-creation of poses and portraits intrinsic to the performative program machine puts the photographer in a duel with the dispositive, creating venues for escaping the power of the one who detains the power of speech in a relationship strategy with the models themselves.

This way, on the tracks of previous debates, we developed the conception of the composition plane as an escape from the lines of force that sanitize the pose, as seen in the attempt to flatten the ground of dance. We provoke an approximation with the planes of composition, highlighting that which composes the mise-en-scène of the funk universe. For such, we considered the constructs of the ethnographic narratives and the syncopated release of the beat, that choreograph the immund poses in the portraits (Image 11; Image 12).

Image 12
Immund poses. Portraits of Lucca Machado and Jeffin Picciane

The black and LGBT people aimed here adopt body styles and attire frequently inspired by the pop culture. For the production of this style, a frontier is crossed regarding what is expected of a corporality referenced by masculinity. The men with whom we proposed to initiate this relationship present themselves to the cameras in a way similar to what França, Macedo and Simões present regarding style:

We suggest bringing closer these issues and the notion of style formulated by Hebdige (1979, 1988), as arrangements related to the production and performance of corporalities that deal with values and representations associated to difference markers, re-elaborating contextually its meaning and impact on social interactions. Style is a way to ‘reveal’ in public a form of staging and communication (2010, p. 48).

This mode of revelation in public consists, as the authors point out, in an always partial and unfinished movement, in which forms of producing subjectivity and identity go through this effort. In these negotiations, visual indexes, in the body understood through an intersecting of social markers, reveal, in the lacração images (strong visual statements) and the close-up of this condition - in which the act of exposing immund vanities proposes to the world a positive value for the diversity of styles.

As an example, the two portraits in Image 13 allow us to see some marks of intersecting gender and race. We highlight what is evidenced in the corporification of certain stigmas related to poverty as far as class goes that can attribute, according to hegemonic concepts, a certain absence of cultural refinement before the conventions of good taste, that reify racism, from contemporary harlequinations.

Image 13
Portrait. Rio Favela Rap portrait

In the context of Rio de Janeiro, a bleached moustache in a black-skinned person activates derogatory stigmas through the symbolic triad black, poor and favela dweller - perversely constructed by the media -, creating traces of reading that lead to fear regarding what the black body might reveal (Image 13).

Other color/race markers are combined: some attire styles, such as sleeveless shirts, bandanas covering long hair with grey dreadlocks, colorful clothing, delicate poses and moustache, as well as the physical constitution, are all gender performances by black and LGBT people (França; Macedo; Simões, 2010).

In terms of style, it is worth highlighting the elaborate manipulation of prosthetics such as artificial hair, dying, tanning, color and size of nails, make-up, customized attire. There are countless possibilities in which the plane of composition leads to the choreography of poses with the intention of letting people see (Image 14) the immund characteristics, instead of sanitizing them.

Image 14
Immund Poses. Portrait of Lucca Machado

In funk, with the gender performance known as pintosa⁵, the body assumes a contestant trait, as seen in the acts of language present in the music composed by women, such as Valesca or Linn da Quebrada. With this, a pintosa also creates a field of power, making the body visible for the duel with the ground, even if, in this process, contradictions may arise, in general those related to mass popular culture.

Consequently, it becomes more evident that the representations, through the gender performance pintosa, appear in a more plural way, corresponding in music and in the body to the diversity of the fluidity of many genders, surpassing the false dichotomies between masculine and feminine. Under this perspective, we can think funk as a modulator of these voices, mediating claims both in musicality and the body, in a similar way to the arrival of the feminine figure that opened that same pathway last decade.

This perception is important when we observe the Brazilian music scene. The city of Rio de Janeiro claims funk for itself - largely based on the speech of MCs, who claim that singers are not composing real funk in other places. There is a certain common sense circulating in Rio that resists when the rhythm assumes other contours, becoming immund in other states - this is the case with the genre techno brega from the state of Pará and the ostentation funk from São Paulo, as well as other rhythms that gain representativeness and public notoriety amongst new names in Brazil. As examples of this, we can name the following public music figures who have conquered a space in the phonographic industry recently such as Liniker (SP), Pabblo Vittar (SP), MC Linn da Quebrada (SP), MC Trans (RJ), MC Xuxu (MG), Lia Clarck (SP), which pairs up with MC Pepita (RJ), and many others (Image 15; Image 16, Image 17). All of them transit through pop music with effervescence.

These singers make themselves seen; their expressions are visible through their styles. Moreover, they are outspoken about gender politics and sexuality.

Image 15
Linker, MC Linn da Quebrada and Lia Clarck

Image 16
Mulher Pepita and Mc Trans

Image 17
MC Xuxu and Pabblo Vittar

However, the pop culture that black and LGBT persons choose to experience goes beyond the immund characteristics of music and dance - and gives these expressions mobility - in choreopolitics such as: clubs for shows, parks with entertaining events such as the gaymadas, samba school rehearsal areas, specific streets, universities, art galleries, etc. In these grounds, the gay artists are lacradoras⁶, feminine, beautiful, fervidas, dangerous, tell it like it is, with no holding back⁷ - only to cite a few of the native categories and their emic patterns, in the form of acts of language that follow the management and behavior of these bodies.

It is interesting to think about the attractiveness of funk when singers expose themselves in this way. The plane of composition of the gender performance pintosa choreographs the pose of pintosa on the ground that makes funk be played. It is a matter of translating this place into images giving “appearance appearance itself” (Agamben, 1996). That is why it is a characteristic of the pinta a certain dose of exaggeration, the making fun of, the appropriation of the gesture in a powerful manner, as a way of attacking stigma, defending a political work, exaggerating expressions in a subversive way, a theme which is also central to the portrait genre (Image 18).

Image 18
Immund poses. Portrait of Lucas Gabriel (left and center) and portrait of Wallace Terra (right)

The pinta dance does not include only the brutality of the gesture, but also the knowledge of creating subtleties and nuances with the immund body (Image 19) - what dirties up, in a certain sense, the virile male clichés. The pinta dance is a powerful possibility of giving amplitude to the body that choreographs, from the most abrupt to the gentlest gesture.

Image 19
Immund Poses. Portrait of Jhury

The portraits constitute an important connection: the dance, with the pinta as an example, whose plane of composition is added onto others (Image 20; Image 21). The kinetic dance is localized in the syncopated release (Viana, 1987; Sodré, 1998) of the funk beat, producing through body oralitures a type of plane of composition (Lepecki, 2012) that is able to choreograph poses.

In the duet between the photographer and the model, planes of composition were established that offer to thought about the body the possibility of observing its kinetics on being black in a broad manner. These are notions and inferences, observed by the theoreticians cited here (Sodré, 1998; Vianna, 1987), applied to the cultural phenomena of the African diaspora - which is the case of a notable characteristic: the ponto, which for funk consists in the electronic and mixed reading of the afro rhythms, that confers to the sound the vibration of the drum, or big drum, invoking the body participation through the syncope.

Image 20
Immund Poses. Portrait of Lucas Gabriel and Lucca Machado

Image 21
Immund Poses. Portrait of Wallace Terra

For funk, the intensity of this convocation of the body has its regulation in this idea of the discharge that modulates the corporal-kinetic climax. In order to think about the plane of composition that formulates the pose, the syncopated release is the propagating element responsible for the bodies’ oscillation and invitations. The syncopated release is able to start-up the immundness, bringing oralitures to the fore and conducting the gesture. (re)choreographing us and producing poses.

In the theory of dance there are discussions that offer a potent dimension to provide to us more instruments to think about what happens in these bodies, showing the relevance, for example, of the notion of still acts:

This call for of standstill escapes the fields of kinetic or composition considerations that used to be its territory in order to become an idea full of force. This force of holding still is what still act in dance, [...] such a powerful and disturbing act, as Didi-Huberman writes, that it can be called resistant (Lepecki, 2005, p. 14).

Further on, Lepecki explains:

The expressive and symbolic qualities of holding still make the phenomenological nature of this (resistant) act of interruption. It is not a synonym of freezing. What holding still does is initiate the subject in another relationship with temporality. Holding still operates on the level of the subject’s desire of inverting a certain relationship with time and with some (pre-established) body rhythms (Lepecki, 2005, p. 14).

The emblematic and symbolic quality of the pose as a still gesture, both at the moment of the click and the image itself in a portrait, leads us to a paradox with no oppositions: it is still, but is not static - in this indissociable relationship between opposing indicibles⁸ that we are able to describe the ground’s body for the images, constituting this way a third trace that names the research - the immund poses.

The pose does not evoke stasis nor interruption; the pose, in the scenes, evokes movements, even when still. A political-kinetic that results from the climax of the duo model-photographer, choreographed in the expanded studio. Moreover, the conditions, in this case, claim an enunciation of its own, in which we find potent beacons in the concept of program (Fabião, 2013). The photographer-model duo, in the machine of the performative program, having as a plane of composition the drive of the beat, or ponto, allows a release of movements directed towards the camera.

The plane of composition of the syncopated release, when it composes the choreographic process of these poses, seems to provoke a recharge in the moment immediately after the pose. Ironically, the characteristic buzzing of the studio flash indicates that, during some fractions of a second, all the bodies and agents of this composition should wait for the literal recharge of the equipment in order to go back to work.

Starting to dance again, model and photographer resume the exchange of impressions based on the choreography; both are aware that there will be a climax. While the photographer anticipates the click, the model, much like a centrifuge, makes his or her way to the center of the square, extrapolating the possibilities of this body in a pose.

The bodies mutually magnetized by the artistic proposition, the machine of the performative program, find in verbs in the infinitive the conduction of the evolving action outside the zones of comfort, which allows the photographic portrait to transit with more clarity through our time, considering all the elements of an action.

Potency lies in inventing horizontalities and in believing that the model-photographer relationship cannot be reduced to the one that controls the instant of the click, the pose, or even the type of gesture that should take place. Both parts are traversed by the historical traces that give them support, by the ground, by the sometimes suffocating setting or context of impositions and sanitizing. To break free from them is part of the poetics - much like proposing that the abject is never only abject and the immund is not always immund, introducing indecidibilities in the more hegemonic traces, leaving the signs less free and anchoring them near those that have the privilege of the voice.

In this sense, the planes of composition offer expanded notions of dance, in which the construction of poses assumes potent forms of relating to the camera that does not only belong to the photographer, but to the scene, with its multiple lines of force that are part of the game. What we search for in the construction of these poses is to understand that the body of the photographer is also an element of the scenes. All we need is to perceive the place that Dacorso and Rosenblatt occupy in the carioca funk world, for it would be naïve to disregard the position that the photographer holds while searching for an image and making it propagate.

The coalition of the black and LGBT people proposes issues to be explored in the many Brazilian cultural preambles and contexts. What this research brings together in images, both from the media and the artistic context, allows us to see the relationship between part of funk’s history as part of LGBT history.

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• VIANA DE PAULO, Rodolfo R. Bixas-pretas do funk: relatos etnográficos sobre construção da vaidade ‘pintosa’. In: ENECULT, 14., 2018, Salvador. Anais... Salvador, 2018.
• VIANNA, Hermano. O Baile Funk Carioca: Festas e Estilos de Vida Metropolitanos. 1987. Dissertação (Mestrado em Antropologia Social) - Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1987.

• 1
  Butler (2017) critically proposes an alternative reading of the Herculine Barbin case based on the diaries that Foucault claims to have found.
• 2
  Sara is the woman with whom Herculine was in love with.
• 3
  Both created artistic materiality with authorial works on the derogatory perspectives created by the media. Between 1998 and 2008, Dacorso was the first photographer to go to funk balls in the Baixada Fluminense region, bringing together images of the carioca funk scene in a series of expositions. Of great visual and dissident contribution, the series from the Vincent Rosenblatt collection, Rio Baile Funk! Favela Rap!, produce narratives that challenge derogatory visions. The authorial works by the French artist came later than Dacorso’s, in funk balls between 2005 and 2014. He attained media notoriety and was the first to produce images throughout almost ten years. Beyond producing expositions, Rosenblatt frequently takes the projections of Rio Baile Funk to Morro do São João, in Vila Cruzeiro, to Santa Marta and Boca do Mato.
• 4
  The incursion referred here is in line with Hal Foster’s perspectives (2014[1996]). In the text The artist as an ethnographer, the author addresses Works intended to undertake thorough investigations between arts and the ethnography field. What Foster (2014) observes is how the production of links with certain topics happens, thus creating possibilities that can be construct from ethnographic incursions by the artist. This led the research to further developments, such as Viana de Paulo (2017; 2018).
• 5
  Pintosa is the native expression used to name those who make it explicit being gay.
• 6
  P.N.: Lacradora means somebody who imposes a trend.
• 7
  Despite not including the research entirely, it can be found on the internet an informal dictionary of Brazilian native LGBT terms, the book Aurélia – A Dicionária da Língua Afiada, by Fred Lib and Ângelo Vip (it is out of print and it was not possible to find the year of the first edition). It lists some entries locating the region of the country where some are more current.
• 8
  Indecidibles are simulacrum unities, false properties, nominal or semantic verbal that do not allow themselves to be understood through the (binary) philosophical opposition and that, however, inhabit, resist and disorganize such opposition, without ever constituting a third term, without giving way to a solution in the form of a speculative dialectic (the pharmakon is neither a medication nor a poison); the supplement is neither more nor less; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction; [...] the breach is neither integrity of a beginning, of a clean cut, nor the single second secondariness. Neither/nor being at the same time exactly this, or exactly that” (Derrida apud Santiago et al., 1976, p. 46). According to an explanation by Nascimento (2004, p. 26-28), the indecidibles speak of metaphors, making a detour from their full origin, and trace of concepts. They function with a certain regularity, serving as border discourse operators, highlighting impasses.
• This original paper, translated by Luiza Ferreira de Souza Leite and proofread by Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue.
• Editor-in-charge: Celina Nunes de Alcântara

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Jan 2020
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  31 July 2018
• Accepted
  26 Mar 2019