The perishable and the disposable in Cildo Meireles, Krajcberg, and Tunga

Abstract

This article investigates the notion of perishability and disposal as a critical axis in the production of Cildo Meireles, Frans Krajcberg, and Tunga, understanding these categories not merely as material choices but as conceptual, political, and symbolic operators. The analysis is grounded in the reflections of Hannah Arendt on the relations between durability, fabrication, and the common world, approaching the remainder as an index of the crisis of forms of permanence and as a site for the critical reinscription of experience. In Cildo Meireles, the use of industrial residues (and their obsolescence), everyday materials, and the construction of ideological circuits challenges systems of value and the institutionalization of art, transforming waste into a critical and sensory experience. In Frans Krajcberg, disposal assumes an ethical and ecological dimension: burned trunks, roots, and natural pigments constitute traces of environmental violence, reinscribing artistic gesture as denunciation and testimony. In Tunga, perishability operates within the field of the formless as a laboratory of an anti-Gestalt of form and object, in unstable environments where matter, eroticism, and fabulation sustain a poetics of enigma. The comparison among the three artists highlights different regimes of the remainder – as critical language, ecological denunciation, and materialized myth – affirming art as a field of tension between history, world, and matter.