“Every Picture is a Death’s Portrait”

“These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence – not of me.” Cindy Sherman

ef·fi·gy – noun

1. Representation (as a shadow) of a person or a personified or symbolic thing. 2. Image, portrait.Effigy is a project wich aims to personify marks, riddles, tales, tokens, allegories, spiritual and human signs through photographic portraits with interventions related to the history of the portrayed persona.

These interventions may vary from charcoal and oil paint to the own character’s urine, pieces of hair and clothes utilization, thereby transcending the image of a matter that someday will cease to be; an lengthening of life portrayed by the transfer of the “soul” throughimage.

They are mortuary portraits inspired by symbolisms, a macabre imaginary of love for life and of the will of being more, as Philippe Áries would say; and according to Hans Belting, the phenomenon of presence/absence gives the image an enigmatic facet wich is explained, partially, by the contradictory relation between the image and its support, which leads the author towards its nature of corporeal being.

Considering the origins of portrait and its uses through history we rely our work on Didi-Huberman’s theoretical studies, which proposes that the portrait has had its birth in the Paleolitic, when human skulls have been filled and adorned by the living.

Would the portrait have been paradoxically born from the void, out from a box full of holes, which is how we can view the skull and the engendered images? Its memories from a life and the materialization of its body through photography.

Effigies - Mortuary Portraits

performance - The name of the performance is based on Chico Buarque de Holanda music - "Cálice" - lyricstranslate.com/en/calice-chalice.html

For this performance, I counted at least 10 men and the act would be me in the crucifixion position, but without the cross, because it brings us back to the masculine figure and I wanted the female figure to be the center of the action. In this action, I am the mirror and I am willing to suffer this humiliation and I make it possible and a group of men in line must urinate on my feet, one at a time.

My first analysis was that for the sake of this feasibility of wanting to suffer this "supposed" humiliation and face a concept of subalternity while placing this sign mirroring the other, thus exalting a pulse and a "negative" attitude that many deny having and, having as a backdrop, the outline of a male figure, however, a woman's body, naked, in order to deface and deconstruct signs assigned to me, culturally by them.
 
I've been trying to carry out this performance about a year and during the first attempt when I was undressing, I was blocked by the police, so, during the second time I decided to approach people and perform the act in an abandoned school in Cambuci - SP. I approached several people and initially my priorities were: artists, actors from liberal or LGBT theaters, people involved with fetish and sex professionals. During the entire process, about 80 people were approached, but many of these people did not answer me, a few stopped speaking to me and others blocked me from social networks.
The reactions ranged from anger to laughter, some thought I was making a joke, and the others largely considered it a sexually oriented performance.

What I hear from the main reactions were;

“I would pee on you if you were a man” - Actor
“I’m sorry, but I like men” - Friend
“(laughter) I would like to see, but I wouldn’t pee on her” - Photographer of artistic nudes
“What a bizarre idea, I wouldn’t urinate on her, no, I don’t like these fetishes” (?) - Known supporter of free love
“Urinate on you? Are you crazy???” - Colleague
“My genital organ is going to appear? Can we throw water instead of me urinating?” - Artist
"I can’t urinate with lots of men looking at me” - Artist friend
“You’re a sick person” - Friend 
 
After trying people who I thought could accept the performance, I decided to approach people from ordinary professions. The reaction was the same:

“Aren’t you afraid of catching a disease?” - Unknown
“This is a proposal?” - Acquaintance
“This is a porn movie? My dick is going to appear?” - Graffiti artist friend
“You are totally sick” - Friend
“My God, Luiza, you are crazier by the day!!!” - Friend
“I would even urinate, man, but you’re my friend”  - Friend
The third attempt ended up in a forest in São Paulo and I waited for someone to decide to urinate on me, but as that would be somewhat unlikely that someone would urinate on someone with open arms, the photographer Costa Lara, who documented the scene, asked people on the street. Most were scared, but we got lucky and a drunk was going by, he probably did not understand anything and just wanted to urinate even though, after urinating, he realized the situation he was in and he left a little bewildered.

The fourth action continues in search of the possibility of performing the act with the original intention: a minimum of 10 men.

 PAI, AFASTA DE MIM ESSE CALICE

Alternative process using as a base digital or analog photography. Mix media, oil paint, charcoal, gold leaf application, metal, natural pigmentation, digital intervention, manipulation, drawing, among other processes.

Inside

“Chimera to affirm the impossibility of transforming past experiences, because if I crave the sky not having wings, I am only a reverie for those who look at me, but, even unable to fly with my fixed feet in which I am predestined arrested, this floor that roots me is no longer absolute looking to what I crave so hard, my eyes fix itself to the worldly desire, changing all the perspective, creating hardness, so I become the most beautiful of all birds. This is the moment in which I discover that to accuse is the comfort of the prisoner, because he points to what he doesn’t know and believes to fly is an illness.”
Photography is taken a dramatic representation, used as approach core and exploitation of the self-psyche, emotional linkages, mental disorders, traumas and depression. In the case of memories that occurred in a substantial past, for the construction of the present. This same past is over, allowing changing lived situations, going to a new path to that experience through the photographic reprocessing. A derived and large in possibilities scene, which protagonist becomes auxiliary-ego, transforming its past in a perspective from another, distancing from the screenplay, desensitizing the situation through self-pictures frames that tells each step of the history, although allowing the manipulation, physical, digital and contextual of the denouement. The daily heart, ready to receive changes under remembrances not owned any longer. If there are ancestral beliefs, of situations and characteristics passed on, I believe that this lace was cut when the photography allowed me to materialize different ends of all the stories attributed to the story that was made of me. It was not possible to be back to the past, but each moment was reprocessed, redefining signs, and making a self-process from the substance.

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Luiza Prado