Cultural autophagy
ID
https://id.alexandremury.art/concept/cultural-autophagy/
PREFIX
am:cultural-autophagy
LOCAL ALIAS
am:autofagia-cultural
AUTHOR
Mury, Alexandre
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17548245
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20823388
Cultural autophagy is a critical operation through which a culture, tradition, symbolic community, or historical formation takes its own signs of authority as material for transformation. These signs may be images, myths, canons, consecrated landmarks, narratives of origin, recognized styles, institutional archives, repertoires of cultural formation, or patrimonial symbols.
The concept describes an internal symbolic digestion. What is transformed is not primarily an external alterity, but the very inheritance that organizes collective memory and conditions its modes of recognition. Cultural autophagy occurs when a cultural sign endowed with strong authority is assimilated, displaced, and returned under another symbolic condition.
Unlike modernist Anthropophagy, which formulates the devouring of the Other as a procedure of cultural transformation, cultural autophagy displaces the vector of devouring toward a culture's own symbolic archive. The metabolized object is no longer the exterior as the main source of incorporation, but the symbolic body of the culture itself: its emblems, narratives, images, devices of memory, and regimes of belonging.
Cultural autophagy does not designate, in itself, homage, parody, citation, appropriation, resignification, intertextuality, or decorative reinterpretation. These procedures may appear within an autophagic operation, but they do not define it in isolation. The result of cultural autophagy is not the simple repetition of the inherited repertoire, but its transmutation into a new field of thought.
The concept may be applied to national, regional, communal, institutional, or artistic contexts. Its essential condition is the existence of an internal critical operation in which a subject, artistic practice, or symbolic community transforms inherited cultural signs into matter for investigation, tension, and reinvention.
Cultural autophagy occurs when a culture critically digests its own signs of authority.
Cultural autophagy emerges in dialogue with the Brazilian paradigm of Anthropophagy, formulated by Oswald de Andrade in 1928. In Anthropophagy, the devouring gesture is directed outward: the foreign, colonial, or European Other is incorporated and transformed into local symbolic substance.
In cultural autophagy, this vector is inverted. The devouring gesture comes to bear upon cultural inheritance itself. What becomes matter for digestion is not the exterior, but the internal archive: the canon, the founding myth, the consecrated landmark, the recognized image, the national narrative, the institutionalized repertoire.
The term “autophagy” is adopted by analogy with its biological use, where it designates an internal process of degradation and recycling of components belonging to the organism or cell itself. In the cultural register, this analogy should not be understood as a direct application of biology to art, but as a terminological displacement: what is critically processed is not cellular components, but signs, images, narratives, and devices of memory belonging to a culture's own symbolic body.
This inversion does not eliminate the relation with Anthropophagy. On the contrary, it reinscribes it at another historical stage. When Anthropophagy becomes canon, heritage, a mark of Brazilianness, or a stabilized interpretive matrix, it may itself be subjected to an autophagic operation. Culture then begins to metabolize not only its contents, but also the symbolic devices that organized its own self-understanding.
Cultural autophagy dialogues with different established concepts in the theory of art, culture, and interpretation, but it should not be confused with them. The following distinctions do not establish rigid boundaries between mutually exclusive categories. They delimit the specific aspect of the autophagic operation, indicating the extent to which already recognized procedures may integrate this process without, in themselves, defining it.
Cultural autophagy is distinct from Anthropophagy. Modernist Anthropophagy formulates the critical incorporation of the Other. Cultural autophagy formulates the critical digestion of one's own cultural repertoire.
It is also distinct from appropriation. Appropriation describes the incorporation, reuse, or displacement of preexisting images, objects, and forms. Cultural autophagy may mobilize this procedure, but its core lies in the critical elaboration of the symbolic heritage to which the artist belongs. The appropriated sign ceases to function merely as reference and becomes matter for poetic transformation.
It is distinct from parody. Parody produces its effects through critical imitation, inversion, irony, or satire. Cultural autophagy may resort to these resources, but its operation does not depend on them. Its horizon is the re-elaboration of a symbolic inheritance, which may equally manifest itself through reverence, tension, melancholy, displacement, corporeality, or critical silence.
It is distinct from resignification in a broad sense. Cultural autophagy describes another operation. Its object is not only the production of new meanings, but the transformation of the conditions through which a given sign becomes intelligible, legitimate, and historically available. The autophagic process incorporates into its own operation the very categories, authorities, and narratives through which that sign had been historically recognized, turning them into matter for critical elaboration. What changes is not only the meaning attributed to the object, but the very regime of meaning production that made it recognizable.
It is distinct from intertextuality. Intertextuality describes relations between texts, images, works, or discourses. Cultural autophagy may make use of these relations, but it shifts the focus from reference to the critical elaboration of the symbolic legacy mobilized. What is essential is not the presence of a dialogue between works, but the metabolization of the cultural inheritance that this dialogue makes operative.
It is distinct from homage. Homage tends to preserve and reaffirm the value of the honored referent. In cultural autophagy, recognition is only the starting point of an operation that subjects this legacy to a re-elaboration capable of altering its conditions of reading.
It is distinct from decorative reinterpretation. Reinterpretation may update formal, stylistic, or thematic aspects of a work without modifying its symbolic function. Cultural autophagy requires the inherited sign to be metabolized as part of the artistic operation, producing a reorganization of its interpretive power.
Cultural autophagy belongs to the expanded field of critical revision of Anthropophagy, but it is not synonymous with re-anthropophagy, zombie anthropophagy, or autophagy in the biological sense. These terms form part of a nearby critical constellation, but they name distinct operations.
Indigenous re-anthropophagy, associated in recent Brazilian art with Denilson Baniwa and with critical readings such as those of Daniel Dinato, repositions Anthropophagy from the standpoint of Indigenous authorship, historical violence, and the dispute over the origin and legitimacy of the devouring gesture. Cultural autophagy dialogues with this revision, but follows another direction: its focus lies in the internal digestion of cultural signs already canonized by a given tradition, community, or historical formation.
The notion of zombie anthropophagy, in Suely Rolnik, describes the capture of anthropophagic power by contemporary forms of capitalist subjectivation. Within this framework, flexibility, mixture, and hybridization may cease to operate as forces of invention and come to function as domesticated adaptation. Cultural autophagy distinguishes itself from this reactive pole when it operates as an active critical force: it does not restore emptied signs of inheritance, but reopens their conditions of reading.
Abaporu (2010), by Alexandre Mury, already conceptually operates the inversion of the anthropophagic vector: what becomes matter for digestion is not the external Other, but the internalized cultural myth itself. The A.M.O. formulates an operational and ontological definition of the concept, linked to an artistic practice, to its own conceptual system, and to a specific semantic modeling. For this reason, within the A.M.O. graph, historiographical interlocutions and lexical references from the field are important as context, but they do not constitute the direct conceptual source of the record. That source is Alexandre Mury's authorial corpus, especially the formulations related to Abaporu (2010), imagetic disappropriation, theoretical disappropriation, critical fiction, and the image that thinks.
In recent Brazilian debate, autophagy appears as a register of a critical tendency linked to the exhaustion of the anthropophagic inheritance. This symptomatic diagnosis is situated above all within the postcolonial horizon of revising Anthropophagy and indicates a zone of discussion, but it does not define the conceptual operation registered here.
The term “autophagy” has circulated previously in other fields of knowledge. In cell biology, it refers to the process by which the cell degrades and recycles its own components. In rhetoric, it may indicate an internal contradiction through which a discourse compromises its own conditions of validity. In contemporary philosophy, notions such as autoimmunity help to think systems that, in attempting to preserve themselves, turn their defenses against themselves.
These relations are useful as transdisciplinary analogies, but they do not define the concept in the A.M.O. register. Cultural autophagy is not a direct application of biology, rhetoric, or immunology to art. It is a critical operation in the field of culture, image, and interpretation. Its specificity lies in the displacement of the devoured object: from external alterity to the symbolic archive itself. The operation bears upon culturally constituted signs, converting them into matter for poetic elaboration and producing new conditions of interpretation.
In Abaporu (2010), by Alexandre Mury, cultural autophagy manifests itself as a critical and conceptual operation through a performatic event converted into a photographic image. The work departs from Abaporu (1928), by Tarsila do Amaral, but it is not limited to remaking it. What is metabolized is not only a specific painting, but the symbolic complex it activated in Brazilian culture: modernist Anthropophagy, the origin myth of national modern art, the consolidation of the canon, and the transformation of an image into a cultural emblem.
The work may be consulted at:
https://id.alexandremury.art/artworks/abaporu-2010/
The autophagic operation occurs because the modernist icon ceases to function merely as a historical reference and becomes the very critical food of the image. The artist's body occupies the position of Tarsila's figure, but not in order to reproduce it passively. It embodies the tension of inheriting a sign already saturated by interpretations, institutional prestige, and identitarian value.
The photograph displaces the painting into another material regime. Body, nudity, beard, sunlight, cactus, soil, framing, and territory cease to be accessory elements and become operators of thought. The work replaces pictorial distortion with a situated bodily presence. The gesture does not seek to simulate modernist deformation through optical tricks; the photographed body, the camera, and the framing establish the point of ignition of the friction with the canon.
Taken in its formal and material autonomy, Abaporu (2010) may be described as a post-conceptual work situated within the expanded field of photography. Its operation articulates self-representation, scene construction, bodily action, territorial inscription, and photographic record. For this reason, different categories may be mobilized as interpretive lenses: performance art, body art, staged photography, performance photography, in situ art, Land Art, environmental art, geopoetics, expanded photography, performatic self-portrait, and body-territory. Each of these categories recognizes one vector of the work: performance emphasizes the bodily event; body art highlights the body as matter and exposure; staged photography recognizes the deliberately constructed scene; performance photography understands the photograph as the final form of an action; in situ art and Land Art emphasize the relation between body, place, soil, cactus, and sunlight; geopoetics and environmental art read the landscape as symbolic inscription; the expanded field of photography situates the image beyond strict documentary record. These categories function as partial, cumulative, and reversible interpretive keys. The work may cross them simultaneously, alternate between them, or remain legible outside any single label.
Critical digestion occurs when the theme assumes the function of operative matter. Anthropophagy, at this point, ceases to be merely a thematic reference and becomes part of the very process reorganized by the image. The return of this process is not an explanation of the inherited repertoire, but an alteration of its conditions of reading. The work displaces the interpretive question: what matters is less the identification of a single visual source than the recognition of the procedures activated by the image — self-representation, staging, bodily presence, territorial inscription, photographic construction, and symbolic reconfiguration.
Within the A.M.O. system, Abaporu (2010) constitutes an operational instance of cultural autophagy because it concentrates this cycle of assimilation, processing, and return. The work absorbs a cultural sign of high density, crosses it through a concrete performatic situation, and returns an image capable of opening readings about body, territory, photography, belonging, cultural memory, and the production of thought. Its possible categories function as mobile lenses for recognizing the operation, not as definitive classification. In this sense, Abaporu (2010) demonstrates the image that thinks: an image that does not merely refer to an inheritance, but reorganizes the way this inheritance can be seen, described, and interpreted.
The concept, however, is not limited to this work. It may be applied to other practices in which a culture, tradition, or symbolic community metabolizes its own signs of authority.
Cultural autophagy integrates the conceptual architecture of the A.M.O. — Alexandre Mury Ontology — as a specific case of imagetic disappropriation.
Imagetic disappropriation describes the operation through which an image detaches itself from its original symbolic matrix and acquires critical autonomy. Cultural autophagy names a particular modality of this process: the one in which the disappropriated matrix belongs to the very cultural archive mobilized by the work.
Cultural autophagy also relates to theoretical disappropriation. When a work critically transforms a sign belonging to its own canon, it does not alter only the image it resumes; it also displaces the interpretive models that attempt to explain it. Theory ceases to occupy an exterior position and becomes affected by the operation of the image itself.
In this sense, cultural autophagy is simultaneously imagetic, performative, epistemological, and hermeneutic.
It is imagetic because it acts upon recognizable visual, symbolic, or cultural signs.
It is performative because it is realized through gestures, bodies, montages, reinscriptions, material displacements, or operations of presence.
It is epistemological because it produces knowledge from friction with inheritance.
It is hermeneutic because it transforms the way a culture interprets its own signs.
The operation may be described on three levels:
Cultural autophagy also dialogues with hybrid dramaturgies and with the self-implicative method. In it, reverence and critique, belonging and distance, continuity and rupture may coexist without synthesis. The subject who performs the operation does not place himself outside inheritance; he participates in it and transforms it from within.
The concept has an autonomous and trans-support scope. It applies to artistic, cultural, curatorial, performatic, textual, visual, or transmedia practices in which an internal symbolic archive is subjected to critical digestion.
It may occur in photography, performance, video, sculpture, painting, installation, text, urban intervention, digital archive, curatorial practice, sound work, or other artistic forms.
It may be applied to national, regional, communal, institutional, or patrimonial contexts, provided that the material mobilized has sufficient symbolic density to operate as recognizable inheritance.
The application in Abaporu (2010) constitutes a practical instance, not a limiting definition. The concept does not presuppose a specific geographic context, although it emerged in dialogue with Brazilian modernism.
For cultural autophagy to occur, it is not enough to cite a known symbol. The operation requires:
The concept does not apply to merely decorative uses of canonical images, conventional homages, fan art, citations without critical displacement, or re-presentations that only confirm the prestige of the original symbol.
skos:broader → Imagetic disappropriation
skos:related → Anthropophagy
skos:related → Indigenous re-anthropophagy
skos:related → Zombie anthropophagy
skos:related → Theoretical disappropriation
skos:related → Critical fiction
skos:related → Hybrid dramaturgies
skos:related → Self-implicative method
skos:related → Hermeneutic metanoia
amo:mobilizedIn → Abaporu (2010)
amo:hasOperationalInstance → Abaporu (2010)
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → Reenactment
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → Self-representation
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → Internal critical digestion
amo:distinguishedFrom → Anthropophagy
amo:distinguishedFrom → Appropriation
amo:distinguishedFrom → Parody
amo:distinguishedFrom → Homage
amo:distinguishedFrom → Decorative reinterpretation
amo:distinguishedFrom → Broad resignification
amo:distinguishedFrom → Intertextuality
amo:hasEtymologicalAnalogy → Biological autophagy
amo:hasArgumentativeAnalogy → Rhetorical autophagy
amo:hasCriticalDialogue → Indigenous re-anthropophagy
amo:hasCriticalDialogue → Zombie anthropophagy
amo:hasHistoriographicDialogue → Recent Brazilian debate on Anthropophagy and autophagy
(am:hasConceptualSource / am:hasDialogueSource)
Distinct from Source — own publications: this field registers conceptual, critical, historiographical, and analogical references that inform the field of dialogue of the concept without being equivalent to it. Cultural autophagy is an authorial concept of the A.M.O.; the sources below indicate genealogies, analogies, frictions, and zones of interlocution, not exclusive origin or conceptual synonymy.
ANDRADE, Oswald de. Manifesto Antropófago. 1928.
ROLNIK, Suely. Esferas da Insurreição: notas para uma vida não cafetinada. São Paulo: n-1 edições, 2018.
BANIWA, Denilson. Re-Antropofagia. 2019.
DINATO, Daniel. ReAntropofagia: uma retomada territorial da arte. MODOS: Revista de História da Arte, Campinas, v. 3, n. 3, p. 276–284, 2019.
PINCHERLE, Maria Caterina. Da antropofagia à autofagia: apontamentos sobre uma tendência do Brasil contemporâneo. Revista Z Cultural, ano 18, n. 1, 2023.
RANCIÈRE, Jacques. Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique, 2000.
FLUSSER, Vilém. Filosofia da caixa preta: ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985.
BEIGUELMAN, Giselle. Políticas da imagem: vigilância e resistência na dadosfera. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2021.
DE DUVE, Christian. Historical reference to the use of the term “autophagy” in cell biology.
PERELMAN, Chaïm; OLBRECHTS-TYTECA, Lucie. Reference to the rhetorical-argumentative use of “autophagy” as discursive self-contradiction.
DERRIDA, Jacques. Philosophical reference to the notion of autoimmunity as a critical analogy.
© Alexandre Mury.
Rights and use policy
https://www.alexandremury.art/copyright
MURY, Alexandre. Da blasfêmia à canonização: dramaturgias híbridas e o método autoimplicativo. Zenodo, 2025. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17548245
MURY, Alexandre. Desapropriação teórica: ficção crítica e metanoia hermenêutica da imagem. Zenodo, 2026. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20823388
FBN: 000679706
ORCID: 0009-0008-9355-4876
ISNI: 0000 0001 2984 3253
VIAF: 15161329794452131121
Lattes: 7735731830748241
Itaú Cultural: 42031