Stripping Time

Abstract

This article instigates relations between an artistic creation and its composition with a political time by examining the artistic project Strip Tempo – contemporary stripteases (2018). The live version of the project premiered the same week Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Its online configuration, Web-Strips (2021), took place during the pandemic. The text begins with a political and aesthetic contextualization of these performances; then, contributions from psychoanalysis and burlesque arts, along with the notion of performative archive, dialogue with the artistic proposition of stripteases. The conclusion affirms that the stripteases – in their live and remote versions – aesthetically and erotically summarize the trajectories of these contemporary artists. They also mobilize discussions about the naked body – whether as the last frontier of an ultra-conservative morality in Brazil, or as an experience that expresses an erotic drive in the arts.

Keywords

• Striptease
• Nudity
• Erotica
• Memory
• Archive