Literature, Art and Madness in Aurora Cursino’s work

Abstract

This paper proposes a reading of the plastic awork by Aurora Cursino published in Aurora: memórias e delírios de uma mulher da vida, organized by Jeha and Birman. As Cursino does not write literature per se, we otherwise hypothesize that his creative gesture, by articulating text and image, language and madness, suggests a literary knowledge and its respective formulation. It’s an artistic work that could be read under the unspecific perspective, properly to break the borders of the aesthetic language. To do so, we take as a basis the studies of Jeha and Birman, especially the archaeology of the context of artistic production that the authors investigate around the life and work of Cursino, as well as the reflections of Michel Foucault on the concepts of madness, language and literature, and the discussions of Didi-Huberman on the relationship between symptom and image. Finally, it can be stated that Cursino's artistic set is examined as an unspecific language that, by associating artistic freedom and the condition of oneself, reveals itself as a work that evidences the discourse of dissidents and acts as a key to resistance against social exclusion.