© Alípio Padilha

Bâtard sauvage investigates the Brazilian and Latin American body from the notion of the "Complexo de vira-lata [mongrel complex]", an expression coined by Nelson Rodrigues in the 1950s to name a chronic feeling of inferiority in relation to Europe and the United States. Through the figure of the vira-lata dog —bastard, mixed-race, impure—the work delves into wounds opened by colonial processes, where the invention of the savage and underdeveloped "Other" establishes hierarchies that still permeate bodies.

Starting from the premise that one of the most effective colonial strategies is to naturalize violence and humiliation and disempower bodies by making them unaware of their own drama, the work proposes a simple gesture: to poke at one's own wound to discover the source of the pain. There is no way to treat a wound that cannot be found. The body is approached as a geopolitical territory, a place where border and interiority become confused. To feel this dog-like body is to recognize the marks of humiliation, precariousness, and submission—but also the forces of adaptation, cunning, and survival that persist within it.

In a whirlwind of images, gestures, and objects—a barrel, plastic bags, a tree branch, ketchup and a hot dog, a surveillance flashlight—the ground constructs an ironic and poetic constellation of Latin American signs. Between mimesis, self-irony, and reinvention, the body oscillates between shame and defiance, docility and savagery. By reclaiming its bastard condition as power, Bâtard Sauvage transforms stigma into a choreographic engine and affirms hybrid identities that survive by contaminating, bending, and reimagining the norms that attempt to domesticate them.

*