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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.

Sec. Migration and Society

This article is part of the Research TopicNegotiating Borders: Body Politics and Artivism in MigrationView all 4 articles

Migrations, Arts, and Bodies: The Silhouette in Multiple Shadows of Rubiane Maia

Provisionally accepted
  • Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Letras, Porto, Portugal

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

This article explores the work of the Brazilian artist Rubiane Maia, currently based in the United Kingdom, focusing on two of her performances as a privileged sociological field for analyzing migration, corporeality, and contemporary art. The main objective of this article is to examine how the artist mobilizes interdisciplinary practices to interrogate memories, displacements, and relations between humans and more-than-humans, focusing on two artistic creations: the Book-Performance and the Speirein. Through a qualitative approach, the analysis highlights how Maia choreographs border experiences, challenging fixed identities and proposing new ways of inhabiting both body and territory. Our study demonstrates how the artist transforms the vulnerability of the migrant body into a creative force, establishing critical dialogues with collective memory and the public sphere.

Keywords: Migration, contemporary art, Borders, identities, body

Received: 27 Aug 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Guerra. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Paula Guerra

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