ISADORA
FROST
From Brazil. Lives and works in Sao Paulo.
Touching Subjectivities
What is it to be an anarchist in this moment in time? A non-state government won’t be implanted any time soon, but we still can act anarchically. A good point of departure is thinking that borders and national identities are multiplicities and not fixed. To address that idea, Isadora Frost went on five journeys throughout her home country Brazil. She used a system that allowed her to reach towns that have been hidden from the media, outside tourist destinations. Frost took a bus to a town she’d never heard of, then chose another and repeated the process several times. Arriving in places she didn’t plan to also challenged the idea of borders inside her country. Frost created unusual interventions in the space, reinventing the function of the architecture and how a body should behave in it. That broke the usual behavioral conduct and what society views as acceptable. All the reactions were important because they unfolded into different situations.
Sometimes those interventions were perceived as threatening and the police were called. Sometimes the residents were curious, in which case Frost would ask them to direct her photo and give her ideas on how to position her body in their space, creating relationships in a playful way. This exchange of viewer/artist role also disrupted the artistic hierarchy: the passive viewer became active and the power became horizontal. These interventions became a way to call the attention of the residents to participate, and change their initial perception of Frost in a position of power as the image-maker. For a moment they weren’t strangers anymore but were both involved in the making of the photograph. The result was an investigation of interpersonal positions of power that engaged both parties in a conversation that revealed subjectivities of our cultural behavior and the nuances which show the multiplicity of our national identity.
