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Cover of Eduardo Kac's Porneia, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2022.

Title: Porneia

Date: 2022

Specifications: Paperback, 200 pages, color images, 7 x 9" (25.5 x 18.5 cm).

Language: Portuguese/English

Publisher: Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Description: Porneia features works realized in the context of the Porn Art Movement, a vanguard that emerged in 1980 under a military dictatorship in Brazil and which, for two intense years, straddled the line between relentless formal experimentation and the outlying demimonde where boundary-busting gender reinvention took place. Through performances, poetry and visual works, as well as through interventions in daily life, between 1980 and 1982 Kac carried out a radical body-based program that upturned the semiotics of normative pornography at the service of activism and imagination.

ISBN: 9781643620268



Interview with Eduardo Kac, author of Porneia!
October 4, 2022 Nightboat’s Director & Publisher Stephen Motika speaks to Eduardo about the Porn Art Movement, Brazilian history, his teenage years at Ipanema Beach, the history of visual poetry, and more!

Eduardo Kac reads from Porneia at Artists Space, New York, October 15, 2022.

Eduardo Kac in conversation with scholar Tie Jojima about Porneia, at Dia Art Foundation, New York, October 16, 2022.

Essay by literary scholar Wilberth Salgueiro about Kac's poem Filosofia (and about the book Porneia) [Portuguese].




Eduardo Kac's PORNEIA was a Finalist for the Anna Rabinowitz Award, given by the Poetry Society of America for "venturesome, interdisciplinary work combining poetry and any other art or discipline."

Special Mention
I also wish to recognize Eduardo Kac's Porneia (Nightboat Books), which arrives like the last bus from the twentieth century, raunchy with possibility. The Movimento de Arte Pornô, of which Kac was ringleader, for two years countered a military dictatorship with nudity, guerilla performance, nude guerilla performance, slogan tee-shirts, goofy phallic masks, cheerfully graphic cartoons and photos, primitive computer graphics, and a cosmic pink miniskirt—whose pinkness must be imagined, and thereby perfuses the entire trove with its buoyancy. Kac's Porneia entails a joyful toolkit for collaboratively countering the latest diktat with an endless gozo of possibility.
Joyelle McSweeney, Juror

Kac Web