The article Rescriptures of the body: memory and archive in the creative process of Christina Elias, jointly authored with the curator Priscila Arantes, was published in the journal Manuscrítica (USP) n. 47: WOMEN, ARCHIVES AND CREATION PROCESSES (December 2022).
In this article, the creation process is analyzed through the lens of the concept of rescripture developed by Priscila Arantes from the theory of the history of Walter Benjamin in the book Rescriptures of contemporary art: history, archive and media (2015). Here the body is assumed as an archive itself so that the works take up aspects of previous works, not in a context of repetition, but in transformation and creation: rescriptures.
These rescriptures operate on three different levels: the first as a creative process itself, in which performance becomes video, which becomes an installation, which becomes an object:
The second as an object of art, in which the movement becomes text, which becomes an image, that becomes movement, that disparts into objects, that recomposes in the body; And the third as a concept, in which the artist conceptually addresses issues related to the passage of time, the metamorphoses of the body, the undoing of everything that seems stable, even her own creation.
"The rescription gesture implies, at the same time, reviewing the idea of a history of linear and historicist art, with a given, fixed and immutable past, and opening the perspective to the understanding of art history open to other scriptures. It is worth remembering the importance of recovering "other" files, other documents generally "excluded" from the official and hegemonic stories of art history, as a gesture permanently open to the repetition of the different " (Arantes 2015 p.98). Thus, the spelling of the story is understood as a presentation always open to other possible meanings.
It is in this unstable place of passage that work is rewritten.