From Ethics to Aesthetic: Marginality in Hélio Oiticica’s Poetry

Abstract

This article takes marginality as its object of study. The thread that connects the analysis is the perspective that the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica gives to the universe of those who position themselves on the margins of the political-social system, during the 60s’, in Brazil. Based on a review of Oiticica's visual and textual works, through which he was able to present his experience with marginalized individuals, we will demonstrate how the aesthetic and ethics questions of marginality also appear in three of his unpublished poems, written in 1968. Reading, writing and transcribing the world, those poems think and question what is in it – problems, existences, relationships –, which makes possible to engender a resistance to what can attack our integrity. Therefore, we will characterize the specific form in which this issue is treated in this type of production. The idea of a po-ethics (SISCAR, 2010) illuminates precisely the material we are dealing with: the language. It is clear, therefore, that reading Oiticica’s, it confirms the knowledge of his aesthetic and ethics thought, understood even in its historicity.