Dung beetle: metalanguage of anthropophagy-coprophagy thinking

Abstract

Excreted things, in general, do not arouse as much interest as that aroused by the spectacle of odorless images, full of humanities and urbanities that inhabit our paper pages, computer and cell phone screens. This scenario preferentially keeps the droppings away from the seven holes of the thinking heads. I think of this sanitized place as the place of production of the dominant thought of our humanity, written language. At the other extreme, in distant places, are sewage treatment plants or submarine outfalls that taking excreta far away, beyond the reach of human vision, thus producing an excreted metalanguage. On the one hand, civilized humans, in their private life, they see daily with a certain contempt their excrements in their own latrines and, eventually, on their toilet papers. On the other hand, the dung beetle lives a reality opposite to this, that is, its daily life is to manipulate and devour excrements with the objective of taking them to some hole where the reproduction of its species will occur. So, the shit is your existential goal. The metaphor of the dung beetle interests me when I see it as an actor-network of border in the continuum anthropophagy-coprophagy. In the centenary of the 1922 Modern Art Week, virtually the hole of the Anthropophagic Movement, this work aims to reflect in a hybrid way mixing anthropophagy with coprophagy, aligning itself with Glauco Mattoso in the criticism of how much we think without excrement. In other words, practically, a hundred years without an anus!