Ti Jácome | Luta Livre

“Luta Livre” departs from a critical reading of struggle in the Western tradition, historically organized around dichotomies of winning and losing, dominating and submitting. This legacy, intensified by war paradigms and colonial violence, continues to shape how we imagine conflict today. Understanding violence as constitutive of the world, “Luta Livre” does not demonize combat; instead, it seeks to celebrate it, rescuing it from these binary logics.

Drawing on plant biology, Orisha mythology, and martial traditions, the project explores conflict as tension rather than destruction or brutality. Formally, “Luta Livre” appropriates American wrestling and its theatrical excess – hypertrophied bodies, spectacular violence, and Manichean narratives – approaching them through the logic of drag. Wrestling becomes a performance of exaggerated masculinity: a caricature of strength, virility, aggression, and violence that, through its very excess, reveals gender as a construction.

Refusing the traditional narrative linearity of a certain literary theater, “Luta Livre” proposes a space where the production of scenic images can communicate without depending on textual validation, privileging deviation and free association over conflict. It treats distraction as resistance to the disciplined attention, efficiency, and immediacy demanded by late capitalism.