PROJECT

Eikṓn, ancient Greek for icon, can mean several things: figure, image, likeness, portrait, image in a mirror, reflection, personal description, similitude, semblance, phantom, pattern or archetype. In his new project, Paulo Guerreiro aims to use these meanings as dramaturgic and conceptual pre-sets in a research on the portrait image of the human body throughout ancient and modern iconography.

Inspired by aesthetic canons related to the human body depiction, the performance will enhance the sexual aspect of such representations, especially the religious and mythological ones. The sexualisation of the ‘sacred’ is a mirroring of nowadays occidental perspectives on the naked body: on one side, the puritan sub-moral that demonises the human naked body and its representations, and on the other, the hedonist post-modern attitude that objectifies it. Another conceptual element throughout the research is the idea of the body as matter or object, comparable to the raw material used by sculptors.

Raw Matter (working title) will be a durational performance with a strong pictorial and visual dimension. It will generate a poetic space where the performer will simultaneously become a living sculpture and its own sculptor.