Anticipating Brazil’s Redemocratization in the Early 1980s

Abstract

This article examines Preparação II (Preparation II, 1976) and Tarefa I (Task I, 1982), two works of video art produced by Brazilian artist Letícia Parente during the last phases of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–85). The actions recorded in these two videos directly respond to political and social transitions experienced in Brazil in the early 1980s: those implemented by the military government as a way to retain soft control of individual bodies, and those enacted by civilians as empowering manifestations of political participation for social change. This article argues that the explicit manipulation of female bodies in Parente’s work—the injection, labeling, and pressing down upon them—evokes the collective anticipation of Brazil’s redemocratization in 1985. Drawing from feminist and social art history approaches, I compare the strategies used by Parente in these two works of video art with the manipulation of female bodies for artistic purposes included in the artworks of Parente’s Rio de Janeiro-based contemporaries Lygia Pape and Anna Maria Maiolino. Examining how Parente’s videos bear witness to Brazil’s slow transition to democracy provides visual evidence of the ways in which national and international political powers inform individual (female) bodies by both enacting physical control over selected populations and catalyzing intersectional feminist movements.