Elle de Bernardini is a transsexual woman, artist and dancer, whose works are largely permeated by her biography. Using several languages, such as performance, video, photography, painting, object and installation, her works address issues of gender, sexuality, identity, biopolitics, power relations and control of the body by the system. Her interdisciplinary practice emerges from the recreational movements of construction and destruction of her androgynous image, a driving force of the artist's interest in investigating and questioning the binary limits imposed socially on what is instituted as male and female, madness and sanity, pornography and art. In the series countersexual forms (2019), the artist uses Paul Preciado and his work Countersexual Manifest, in which the Spanish philosopher proposes a non-binary social model in which individuals would be understood as “talking” bodies or subjects imbued with power. Preciado also presents contrasexual inversion practices such as dildotectonics and dildotopia, technologies that, radically influencing interpersonal and sexual relationships, would allow the rupture of a system that imprisons bodies and forms of pleasure. Armed with these concepts, Elle de Bernardini creates objects that allude to body parts, especially erogenous zones, recombined in unusual ways. Through a synthetic representation of these limbs, such as breasts, vaginas, anus, etc., Bernardini develops a kind of formal lexicon of his own, in which supposedly dildo-legs or dildo- arms, clitoral implants and hole openings would be possible in various parts of the body, deconstructing the conjectures of a presumed unique bodily materiality.

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Beatriz Lemos, 2019 - MASP catalog. "Female Stories, Women Artists after 2000". Curator: Isabella Rjeille