O Museu Travesti e o Arquipélago de memórias antimonumentais na obra de Mario Bellatin

Abstract

Mario Bellatin’s textual body presents numerous ramifications of entries and exits through which reading can be accomplished. In face of his unsystematic and fragmentary writing, Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne presents a methodology to deal with the puzzles created by Bellatin’s works. Whereas Warburg’s Atlas establishes a space for reflection, proposed as an installation system to think history nonlinearly through a private collection of images, Bellatin’s writing operates as a platform of images and meetings, where a net of affections is woven, presenting a series of real biographies and ghosts. Similarly to Warburg’s boards, Bellatin creates spaces full of emptiness and memory constellations that light up intermittently and contrary to the columns erected by official history. Thereby, antimonumental aspect in Bellatin’s works is highlighted as a possible point of convergence of disputing memories, which are often subterranean and silenced by the hegemonic power. Among numerous ways to reflect upon the politics of memory within Bellatin’s work, thanatopolitics (the system that regulates the politics of death) was elected as the central axis of this research.