Beyond Consumption: Cannibal Aesthetics and Politics in Tamara Cubas’ Anthropophagic Trilogy

Abstract

This article reflects with Tamara Cubas’s Trilogía Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Trilogy, 2016/2017), on cannibal incorporation as an aesthetic-political creative strategy that challenges colonial and capitalist logics embedded in contemporary dance. It aims to stimulate a mode of thinking nourished by subversive alliances, where the body becomes a site of dispute and epistemic potential. Dance is approached as a space of experimentation to reinvent the relationship with alterity, advocating for an ontology of bodily appetite at the intersection of memory politics, the body-asarchive, and authorship. The text engages with debates on dietetics as a  system for regulating bodily appetites and subjecting desire a nd pleasure to t he rule of reason (Campos Salvaterra 2023), proposing that the institutional artistic system turns dietetics into a n ontological question: prohibiting the act of eating bodies implies prohibiting the act of nourishing oneself w ith other epistemologies, of creating on one’s own terms. Cubas’s work emerges as a philosophical-corporeal ally for reclaiming appetite for alterity as a gesture of resistance and alliance, and for rethinking the body beyond binary frameworks