Bio — Luiza Prado

MAVRA, a pseudonym of Luiza Jesus do Prado used in selected body-based works, develops a performative practice that articulates absurdism, BDSM, ritual and the hyperbole of sexual stereotypes as dispositifs for the investigation of memory.

Absurdism operates as a method of narrative fracture, interrupting linear logics and exposing fissures in the historical construction of identity. By staging situations of displacement and symbolic collapse, her performances activate repressed layers of individual and collective memory.

BDSM are mobilised as an allegory of social theatre, in which power, submission and desire are staged as codified roles. By relocating these signs into the space of performance, the artist foregrounds their choreographic and socially constructed dimension.

She also employs the radical amplification of stereotypes of sexuality, operating through the saturation and distortion of these codes. By exaggerating signs of eroticised femininity, she exposes their constructed and performative nature, revealing the cultural memory that sustains gendered imaginaries. Influenced by butoh and traversed by the figure of the matuto, her practice invokes a rural, archaic body displaced from hegemonic centres. This body carries territorial and ancestral memories, articulating precarity, spirituality and death as continuous processes of transformation.

Her performances assume a ritual character, treating the body as symbolic code and liminal organism.

Corporeality emerges as an animalistic and agender territory, anterior to fixed categories of identity. In this state, the body operates as a primary language, instinctive, pre-verbal and mnemonic, where memory is not merely recollection, but physical inscription and sensorial transmission.