A exposição “Vestidos em Arte: os Nus nos Acervos Públicos de Curitiba” e a incidência de ofensivas conservadoras, difundidas por meio das redes sociais digitais (2017-2021)

Abstract

Through this research I sought to present the exhibition “Dressed in Art: nudes in Curitiba’s public collections”, held at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum – MON, in the City of Curitiba between July 14, 2017 and March 25, 2018, and as main objective to identify how and by whom the conservative offensives against the exhibition, materialized in footage and posts with false content, were disseminated through digital social networks. It is important to emphasize that the date reconciles with the obscure period in which several attacks of intolerance, persecutions and attempts at censorship against the plastic and performing arts intensified in Brazil, and those with nudity contents and which covered questions of identity of gender, were the most targeted. “Dressed in Art” was accused of promoting “gender ideology”, a factoid term applied to delegitimize identities that deviate from heteronormative standards and used as a recurring agenda of anti-gender movements, which unite under the same banner, conservative religious sympathizers of different beliefs. And partisan electoral elections in defense of morals and good customs. I established the period of analysis of the offensives, from the date of publication of the posts, found on social networks, which were disseminated from 2018 to the year 2021. For that, the case study research was adopted as a methodology from the approach qualitative-quantitative. The methodological course included the collection of offensive messages shared on the social networks of conservatives, with the objective of identifying, reporting and analyzing how they were disseminated and cataloging them in a spreadsheet created by the author, based on the Observatory of Censorship in Art. Data analysis of the exhibition was carried out from the digital collection provided by the curator Stephanie Dahn Batista and analysis of the exhibition’s Notebook of Memories in the MON collection to identify the works and exhibition processes. Interviews were conducted with the curatorial body, and with the artists Rodrigo Braga, Alexis Azevedo de Morais and Geraldo Leão, who had their works attacked, in order to carry out a dialogue between these pairs. Considering that the artistic production present in the exhibition was related to issues of gender, identity and sexuality, in this research, I bring the terms from the perspectives of feminist studies, in order to signal the marks inferred through anti-gender discourses. Of the 99 works exhibited, 10 works appeared in the attacks, and were articulated with greater emphasis in the dissertation, só that the reader could reflect on the censorship attacks traced by the post-censorship and fostered by the conservatives. There were more than 64 direct publications, eleven thousand reactions, four thousand shares and two hundred and thirty-two thousand views of offensive posts on social networks. The tactic of this restrictive movement, in the case of the attacks against Dressed in Art, failed, as they were unable to close the exhibition, however, other objectives were achieved. It is concluded that, what happened in Curitiba, was an attempt to replicate the same commotion and media repercussion that occurred in 2017, against “Queermuseu” and the performance “La Bête”, attacks of a political electoral character of religious benches to the self-promotion of practitioners of conservative offensives.