Eduardo Kac | Movimento de Arte Pornô

Eduardo Kac

Movimento de Arte Pornô Praia de Ipanema

Self-published, 1982

DVD, 4:43

Edition of 10 signed and numbered copies

A short black & white 16mm film transferred to video (the original film is lost) featuring documentation of the performance Interversão. 

“On February 1982, I presented with the Gang a multi-hour event in Ipanema Beach’s Posto Nove [Lifeguard Post 9], “the place to be”—the well-known, crowded epicenter of the beach. This location held a specific significance for the movement, since it was the same location where it started two years before. The 1982 event mobilized 9 performers, explored the entire repertoire of the preceding two years, included a wide array of props and publications, climaxed with a nude demonstration along the beach (which is still forbidden by law), instigated public participation, and culminated with a collective dive in the ocean—a symbolic act meant to signify self-renewal, the beginning of a better path forward. Equal-parts perversion of the Brazilian Catholic tradition of ritualistic public processionals and guerilla-like echo of organized labor demonstrations, this beach uprising was at once the epitome and the terminus of the movement. Dubbed “Interversão” (a neologism, a contraction of the words intervention and subversion, which also suggests “a version in between”), the event layered poetic, performative, social, political, and personal agendas into one radical and exuberant manifestation. Such was the impact that it was featured on national media, including television. Comme il faut, the movement started with the Gang and ended with a bang.”

- Eduardo Kac