Precarious Identities: Eduardo Coutinho and the elaboration of a sensible world of the anonymous

• Grant number: 24/07416-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Gilberto Alexandre Sobrinho
• Grantee: Pedro Caetano Eboli Nogueira
• Host Institution: Instituto de Artes (IA). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project builds upon the practices and theories of the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, to intervene in a series of recent disputes concerning the relationships between art, politics, and identities that have been rising in prominence in the fields of critical reflection, artistic production, and curatorial practices since the 1990s. After releasing the film "Twenty Years Later" (1984), the filmmaker directs his political and artistic practices towards listening to anonymous people, who belong to cultural and social realities different from his own. These people tend to occupy a place of invisibility or subalternity and share a history, an experience, or belong to a particular territory. However, each individual's speech tensions the expectative suggested by the social position to which they belong, challenging the principles that identify them. We start from the hypothesis that, by establishing connections between art and politics through the inscription of an interval between identities, the filmmaker's practices offer a critical distance from essentialist conceptions of identity, enabling a fruitful dialogue with some issues raised within major circuits of contemporary art. Based on Jacques Rancière's method of equality, this investigation juxtaposes the filmmaker's practices and theories with curatorial discourses, philosophical, sociological, and historical theories. In addition to bibliographic research, we envision exploring physical and virtual archives, focusing on three axes of analysis: 1) politics of the anonymous; 2) memory, fiction and the writing of history; 3) pedagogical will of political art and the political limits of sociological thought. The research will result in courses, the publication of papers in journals, and the participation in seminars and conferences.