Anti-Platô

2022

Anti-Platô is a collaborative performance project developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, combining concepts of Reification, the Body Without Organs, and Proxemics to reflect on the forced reshaping of social and spatial relations. Using data on interpersonal distance across cultures and the WHO’s one-meter safety guideline, the project stages a collective action in the public spaces of Belo Horizonte. Five performers, physically connected by a long red fabric mask, move through the city as a single hybrid body-object. This sculptural organism, at once constrained and unified, embodies the tensions between distancing, interdependence, and the psychological disorientation produced by the pandemic. The intervention draws on references from philosophy, anthropology, and performance art, proposing a temporary rupture in the logic of social isolation through embodied presence, shared movement, and spatial negotiation.

As one of the project’s photographers, I documented the entire trajectory of the performance across multiple points of the city. My images explore the physicality of the stretched fabric, the tension between bodies, and the altered rhythms of movement imposed by distance. Working with both color and black-and-white 35mm film, I approached the performance from an “inexpressive” photographic aesthetic—one that highlights neutrality, tactility, and the raw plasticity of the bodies involved. The resulting photographs function as more than simple records: they expand the conceptual landscape of the project, revealing how bodies, objects, and urban space interact under constraint. Through this visual archive, the performance becomes a study of collective form, vulnerability, and resistance in a moment when proximity itself had become both threat and longing.