COLLECTIVE HEAD

CABEÇA COLETIVA –
A PROPOSAL BY LYGIA CLARK

Rebuilt and performed by AnaVitória

The visual arts and their vanguard thoughts of (inter)relations with all other artistic languages, influenced and modified the writing of dancer and choreographer AnaVitoria (1969) and her understanding of corporeality. This approximations was given throughout various aesthetic investigations, but mostly through thinking absolutely free of framing and molds proposed by Ligoa Clark, visual artist from Minas Gerais (1920-1988). This irreverent and restless brazillian artist frayed borders, placing into debate in the contemporary art arena the subject and their existential questions. Her work proposed over anything, tools to think about the encounter of arte and life in an absolutely inseparable way, conceiving then, the body as a home that must be inhabited by the subject: a place for singular experience, not normative nor open.

Since 2009, AnaVitoria has been developing and deepening her dialogue with the Clarkian propositions, as seen in her other Performance Installations – Afinal, o que há por trás da coisa corporal? (2010), Ferida Sábia (2012), Pulsão do Laço (2014), DSÍ (2016) and DSÍ-embodyment (2022). Developing performance wise in this projects some propositions like “estruturação do self” and the use of “objetos relacionais”, among other devices created by Clark. In 2017, invited to participate in the Festival Dança em Trânsito in its 13th edition, a festival with an itinerary that sees the movement of artists and audience from the conventional spaces of the scenic arts, AnaVitoria proposes the presentation of the “Cabeça Coletiva” (1974) by associating its performative concept of movement and interactiveness directly with its audience, as well as its originality within a performing arts event. “Cabeça Coletiva” proposed during the Festival Dança em Trânsito in Rio de Janeiro was presented at the Casa França-Brasil in august of 2017, until its public walk and exit in the closing of the event on 27/08/17 at 11h in itinerancy of the Armazém da Utopia at Cais do where AnaVitoria performed a solo with the “Cabeça Coletiva” and left walking with its audience in the direction of the Museu do Amanhã, then to Museu MAR where it was placed for visiting from 29/08 to 01 of October 2017.

AnaVitória searched, together with the Clark family and the cultural association “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”, maintainer of its collection, rights and patrimony, the support needed for the realization of this proposition in the most precise way possible, with the commitment to publicize and put into practice the work of this creator in the artistic world. Since this encounter, Álvaro Clark, son of the artist, invites AnaVitória to rebuild the “Cabeça Coletiva” for exhibition at the Queermuseu – Cartografias da diferença na arte brasileira at Santander Cultural in Porto Alegre (2017).

In 2025 AnaVitória will be doing the third rebuild of the “Cabeça Coletiva” now for exhibition, which will happen in May at the National Gallery in Munich, Germany.