The document in the contemporary scene - from the index to the symptom

• Grant number: 22/13646-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2023
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Theatre
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Fernando Ramos
• Grantee: Janaina Fontes Leite
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From a theoretical and aesthetic perspective this project seeks to map, organize, deepen and disseminate the reflection on the document as the central topic of a wide spectrum of the contemporary scene that has been flirting with the so-called "real" in its various matrices, The document is largely preserved as a central element (although with very different perspectives, which we will seek to illuminate from the notions of index and symptom). On the one hand, the document in its dimension of indexer of the real, attested by the creators as proof, truth value, converted into numbers, photos, letters, objects made relics, people in the position of witnesses, touchstone of the so widespread - and controversy - distinction between "real" and "fiction" in the contemporary scene. On the other, the document as a symptom, a notion forged from the work of Georges Bataille, more specifically his aesthetic project around the magazine "Documents"that we seek to elucidate and that seems to respond to searches and intuitions that have already been announced in recent years through concepts such as "abjection" - from the authors Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein - or the notion of real as taken from psychoanalysis and philosophy, especially in authors like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou. We are interested, through these two perspectives - the document as an index and the document as a symptom -, redo the long route drawn so far and analyze the materials generated and references collected in this trajectory that add the master's and the doctorate, not only, given the numerous creation laboratories and theoretical workshops that were fundamental spaces for elaboration and application of research. And build, thus, in course format this project, "The document in the contemporary scene: from the index to the symptom", in addition to its developments in laboratories, articles and, especially, a new aesthetic creation that we call for now "Deeper". "Deeper" is an unpublished creation proposal that follows our artistic research combining, once again, theory and practice, experimentation and authorial creation. It takes the theme of the limit - of consciousness, of the body - added to the investigation of language from the technology of the metaverse. It also adds to the study of psychosis, deepening, on the one hand, the relationship with psychoanalytic theories already central to the master's and doctorate and, on the other, investigating the formal possibilities that psychotic structure opens to the field of aesthetic and narrative creation. Finally, from the theoretical point of view, it is asked how to think the notion of document applied to the body in its material and immaterial powers.From index to symptom is the thread that we believe we can cover and retrace in its main concepts and examples taken from multiple languages during these 14 years of research, added to the steps we intend to take in the next two years through an unprecedented artistic research.We believe that this is a significant contribution and of broad interest seen the ballast that the scenes of the real have left in the current theater, presenting potential, but also limits, that our discussion intends to illuminate. It also lends itself, not only to theatre, but to contemporary arts in general, especially to cinema and the visual arts, deeply marked by framing games and ways of tensing and problematizing the real.