What appears when Munch, Duchamp, and Antonieta's Samba meet?

Corpographies, dissent, and the politics of the sensible between art and the city

Abstract

This essay articulates body, city, and the politics of the sensible through The Frieze of Life (c. 1890–1910) by Edvard Munch, Étant donnés (1946–1966) by Marcel Duchamp, and contemporary urban practices located in the Centro Leste area of Florianópolis, with particular emphasis on the Samba de Antonieta. From a phenomenological perspective, the text proposes an understanding of these experiences as corpographies—sensible inscriptions of the body in space—that produce specific modes of subjectivation. In dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Jacques Rancière, the essay approaches the image and the urban gesture as fields of dissent and survival, in which the body appears not as representation but as a vulnerable and insistent presence. Between the scream, the fissure, and the song, the essay argues that aesthetic and urban experience constitutes a fundamental political field, capable of challenging regimes of visibility and reinscribing the possibility of the common within contemporary space.