The lepidopterus machine

feminine body in recent works of Gabriela Carmona Slier

Abstract

This article addresses the recent work of the Chilean visual artist Gabriela Carmona Slier as an aesthetic machine. Due to its particularity, this work is approached from the schizoanalytic perspective of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The article discusses how the artist contributes to deconstruct and, at the same time, reinvigorate the archetype of the butterfly-woman, by shifting her attention to the metamorphic process of the lepidoptera. In the connection of the artistic machine, the feminist machine and the decolonial machine, the artist produces an insect devenir both alternate and minor, which allows the transformation of women. Through a plastic and performative aesthetic machine, the artist's body is made body with other female bodies. Thus, it generates a poetic of withdrawal and deployment that suggests that the mutation of the insect-woman inside its chrysalis is as crucial as the fluttering of imago or butterfly that usually obscures it.