Lyz Parayzo – Cuir Mouvement, 2024

Intrinsically autobiographical, the work of artist and activist Lyz Parayzo is a critical re-interpretation of the modernist artistic tradition in Brazil through the prism of gender, identity and politics. She has developed a therapeutic practice of creating “magical objects” out of metal, a material that has echoes of assembly lines and industrial exploitation. Her performances, sculptures and installations explore the dynamics of power, violence and desire, and set in train new rituals of healing.

The installation Cuir Mouvement comprises metal mobiles in the shape of circular saws. The sculptures take the form of jagged spirals, which create paradoxical tensions that are dangerously sharp for those who approach them carelessly, but protective for those who stay cautiously at their centre. In their quest for a renegotiation of dominance, Lyz Parayzo’s works are “double-edged” tools, in that they are as much defensive measures as performative weapons against the violence to which she is subjected by virtue of her body and her transfeminine identity. Through the fashioning of armour and sharp instruments, her artistic practice has devised strategies of resistance that help to create ways of being for queer and racialised communities.