ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of the Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz’s Medea about to kill her children. Muniz’s artistic proposal re-elaborates Eugene Delacroix’s classic painting of Medea in the form of a large-scale collage made of an accumulation of disposable materials that, photographed from a distance, reproduce the image of the canvas. The chapter argues that Muniz’s work echoes Medea’s resistance to being confined to rigid forms of representation, as a disruptive character that defies traditional categorizations of behavioral structures. The analysis reveals that Vik Muniz’s own aesthetic proposal has important connections to Medea as an itinerant and hybrid figure who resists categorization; her precarious existence is embodied in the material composition of the work, while becoming the expression of her rebelliousness and reluctance to be deposed and rejected by a system that uses her as it pleases.
