Wiping your own shit with art

Photo-performance – 2021

Text by curator Carolina Rodrigues, included in the Arte como trabalho (Art as Work) exhibition catalog:

The photo-performance Limpar a própria merda com arte (Wiping your own shit with art) satirizes the role of the artist as a figure endowed with a strictly intellectual function—an idea that creates a rift between art and the tasks of everyday life, establishing a hierarchy of roles that ought not to exist. Keeping one’s home clean through one’s own labor is not only an act of self-care but also stands in opposition to the precarious forms of outsourced labor that have become normalized in our country. Mery Horta also pokes fun at the concept of beauty in art history, framing the clean home as the ideal of beauty she seeks to attain as an artist. The work also challenges the dynamics of labor distribution regarding race and gender; these dynamics are subverted when this Black woman positions herself as an artist-worker cleaning up her own shit—claiming a stance of self-sufficiency and humanity rather than one of subservience.

Collaboration/Photography: Ramon Castellano

Awarded the Arte como trabalho prize.