ILUMINATRIZ: Construindo novos apontamentos para uma estética da luz

Abstract

This dissertation traces the author’s trajectory as an actress-researcher-lighting designer, investigating the intersection between art, stage practice, and practice-as-research. The figure of the “iluminatriz” emerges as a conceptual and practical axis, integrating acting and lighting through the intuitive manipulation of alternative materialities in experimental processes. By employing everyday objects — candles, cell phone flashlights, fabrics, mirrors, CDs, and others — the research demonstrates how performance can be created from simple resources, democratizing access to artistic creation and reframing gambiarra as both aesthetic and political practice. Grounded in practice-as-research methodologies Nelson (2013) Leite (2018) and experimental laboratories Scialom (2021), the study highlights the poetic potential of the body in dialogue with light, inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception (1999), which conceives aesthetic experience as embodied and interwoven with gesture, vision, and touch. At the same time, it engages with Simondon’s techno-aesthetics (1999), which enables an understanding of gambiarra as a process of individuation, in which technical objects — even the simplest ones — become mediators and co-authors of creative gestures. The COVID-19 pandemic is addressed as a challenging context that fostered low-tech creative solutions, while the pedagogical dimension of the research unfolded in workshops and laboratories where female collectivity and shared experimentation emerged as spaces of invention and care. The dissertation also dialogues with key reflections on lighting and gambiarra (Souza 2011) Bonfanti (2015) Flecha (2021) Camargo (2000, 2012, 2018) Tudella (2013), reaffirming lighting as a sensitive and tactile experience in which body and technique intertwine, establishing a unique poetics of gambiarra and an insurgent political-aesthetic gesture within contemporary performing arts.