Author

Susana de Noronha  

Abstract

This book analyses and comments twenty-four artistic projects created by women focused on the female experience of breast cancer. Contradicting the concept of representation or reproduction of reality, art, as an object or project, is perceived as a constitutive element of the experience itself, deep-rooted in the way one lives, understands and acts on cancer. From the diagnosis to the traces of mastectomy, implant or metastasis, the ink of art helps giving meaning, shape and color to breast cancer and sustaining and reconstructing women suffering from it. Going through an international list of photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and collage, the book suggests a redefinition of art as knowledge and intervention practice, relevant not only to individual processes of confrontation with illness but also to information, demand and activism actions boosted by social ambitions. Between undoing and redoing breasts, bodies and lives, these artists shaped and used art objects using and blending the knowledge of experience, biomedicine and society, redefining cancer as a socially produced reality about the word, against the concept of spontaneous reproduction inside the body.

Biographic Note

Susana de Noronha is an anthropologist and holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology by the University of Coimbra. In 2003, she won the Bernardino Machado Award, offered to the student with the best final grade in Anthropology and, in 2007, the CES Award (ex aequo) for the dissertation which resulted in this book. (CES Award is an international award for the best research monograph produced by young social scientists from the nine countries, in all continents, which have Portuguese as official language.) At professional level, she is a Doctoral student in sociology at the University of Coimbra, and she is also the lyricist of the bands At Freddy's House and Pyroscaphe, projects with international edition and distribution. The details of the author’s profile and work can be found at her website www.susananoronha.com

Commentator:

Alexandra Silva holds a Graduate Degree in ‘History of Contemporary Ideologies and Utopias’ by the University of Coimbra. After being a teacher, she was also a junior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (2003-2006).Currently, she is a doctoral student in Arts, with a Research Grant from The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, having CES as host institution. In 2008, a cancer, a radical mastectomy, a subcutaneous mastectomy, chemotherapy sessions and hormone treatments gave her a new way of seeing the world and life. She is a full-time oncologic Woman and ‘Fighter’.


Edition: Edições Afrontamento and CES (‘Saber Imaginar o Social’ Book Series).

Event organization: Jacqueline Adams