Patrimonial guerrilla: art, body, and narratives in the monumental landscape of Recife

Abstract

Modern major cities frequently use monuments to inscribe narratives of a glorious past, building a symbiosis between peace and discipline that erases the founding violences of the established order. Countering this patriarchal and colonial logic, this work investigates the phenomenon of “patrimonial guerrilla,” analyzing how the artistic interventions of Clara Moreira and Juliana Notari in Recife resignify urban heritage. The research focuses on Moreira’s “giant woman,” who wanders through the city and intervenes in its phallic landscape to “pierce the silence” and propose a “horizontality”, and on Notari’s installation “Diva,” an “inward-facing” monumentalism that operates as a “prospection” of the colonial and gendered wound in the territory. Through an interdisciplinary approach that articulates urban, gender, and decolonial studies, the study examines the artistic corpus and the artists’ discourses to understand their counter-hegemonic tactics. The results indicate that Moreira’s “desiring destruction” aims to rewrite the landscape without annihilating it, while Notari’s prospection exposes the “blood hidden by the monumental aesthetic of patriarchy,” transforming the wound into a source of power. It is concluded that this guerrilla does not seek the abolition of heritage, but its strategic subversion, “digging traps for the erection of heritage” in order to open space for the emergence of other urban memories and futures.