ART, SUBJECT, AND HISTORY: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF BOMBS THAT MATERIALIZE IN THE URBAN BODY OF CITIES IN MATO GROSSO
Discourse; Urban Art; Bombs; Mato Grosso; City.
This research is situated in the field of materialist Discourse Analysis and aims to understand urban art as a This dissertation is situated within the field of Materialist Discourse Analysis and takes as its object of study bombs, understood as urban art practices inscribed on the body of cities in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The city is approached as a symbolic space of discourse circulation, in which meanings are produced, disputed, and historically transformed. Frequently associated with discourses of criminalization and erasure, bombs are analyzed as discursive gestures through which peripheral subjects inscribe themselves in urban language, mobilizing collective memories and challenging stabilized meanings related to art, order, and belonging. The research is grounded in the hypothesis that these inscriptions operate as practices of resistance and symbolic re-existence, producing shifts in the ways urban space is signified. The main objective is to understand how bombs, as a discursive practice, re-signify the city in different urban contexts within Mato Grosso. Specifically, the study examines the discursive functioning of these materialities based on their conditions of production, formulation, and circulation, as well as the subject positions and meaning effects they generate. The theoretical framework is based on the contributions of Michel Pêcheux and Eni Orlandi, particularly regarding the notions of discourse, ideology, subject, and discursive memory. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative approach, with a corpus composed of photographic and audiovisual records of bombs collected in the cities of Cáceres, Cuiabá, and Várzea Grande, in addition to materials produced by local urban collectives. The analysis indicates that bombs function as discursive materialities that affirm presence, produce subjectivation, and establish symbolic disputes in urban space, reinforcing the political dimension of urban art in the constitution of identities and social memory.