"How much weight do you carry?"

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Conceived more than ten years ago by actor and author Leo de Paula, the project proved to be the embryo of his ongoing research into the fat body and its aspects in the field of performing arts. In it, Leo addresses social, affective and subjective experiences from the perspective of bodily identity.

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The trigger for the creation of O Corpo Emagrecido comes from the artist losing 50kg in just six months. Dissatisfied with himself, Leo believed that the solution was to have a body that met hegemonic standards. Once he lost weight, however, he did not identify with what he had become.

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It is at this crossroads that he decides to begin a new process of self-recognition and begins a unique investigation into his anxieties: where do they come from? How do they relate to their history, their drives and the other person’s perspective? How can they transform?

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Their questions and discoveries began to be elaborated through writing, singing and performance. Over the course of this decade, the project's writing expanded to include narratives of other bodies and experiences. Since then, Leo de Paula has dedicated himself to finding the dramaturgy, staging and interpretation of the deviant bodies that he has encountered during the research process for the show, mixing his story

personal to the stories collected.

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By uniting different life stories, combining reality and fiction, the author builds a representation of the universe of people with marginalized bodies in Brazil, giving voice to personal narratives that present doubts, suffering and transformations.

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* Corpo Emagrecido was part of the curatorship of the 2a Black project (winner of the 2018 Shell Innovation Award, Rio de Janeiro), the In-Out exhibition (2018, Cannes, France), the Konvent Residência program (2019, Berga, Spain) and the Pink Screen Festival program (2019, Brussels, Belgium).

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