This essay examines the Brazilian collective 3NÓS3 (1979-1982) through the conceptual lens of profanation, understood as an operative strategy enacted across urban space and media circulation. Starting from the group’s final institutional intervention at the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo (1982), the article reads this moment not as a rupture but as the crystallization of a practice developed outside traditional art circuits through clandestine urban actions, infrastructural interferences, and deliberate engagements with mass media. Moving backwards from the museum to the street, the essay reconstructs the logic of the collective’s interversões – ephemeral interventions employing plastic bands, cellophane rolls, and minimal graphic gestures within highways, underpasses, monuments, and galleries. These actions sought to suspend the functional and symbolic separation governing both urban infrastructures and cultural institutions, without fully neutralizing their use. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation while testing its conceptual limits, the essay argues that 3NÓS3’s practice does not simply abolish aura but reconfigures it within circuits of mediation, where meaning and intensity emerge through repetition, displacement, and circulation. Special attention is given to newspapers, television, mail art, and printed multiples as constitutive elements of the works rather than secondary documentation. By operating simultaneously within the city and its media representations, 3NÓS3 articulated a form of artistic action that treated the museum, the street, and the press as contiguous segments of the same spatial and communicative continuum. The essay ultimately positions the collective’s work as a prescient exploration of artistic profanation within an increasingly mediatized urban condition, where resistance unfolds as much through circulation as through physical presence.
Simone Rossi (Thu,) studied this question.