Concept

erōtikós is a documentary that expands the mythologies of Eros and explores love, sexuality, and eroticism across clinical, aesthetic, and political dimensions.

Led by a team of women investigating the electricity that moves, ignites, and empowers us, the project creates new erotic narratives through conversations with artists and researchers answering the questions “what is your name?” and “what calls you (or calls to you)?”, guided by the intimate listening of psychologist and project director Maíra Scombatti.

The research unfolds in podcasts (with more than 200,000 plays and a place in Spotify’s Top 20 in 2023 and 2024), a book, and a feature film with releases planned for 2026.

Synopsis

“Eroticism is the poetry of the body just as poetry is the eroticism of language”

Octavio Paz

What is the erotic?

The dictionary tells us of an adjective related to eroticism: what tends to provoke love or sexual desire, and what addresses and describes sexual love. Its etymology is Greek (erōtikós) and relates to the mythological figure of Eros.

Also described as the god of love, in Greek narratives Eros may be a child of Aphrodite (Venus) or one of the primordial gods born from Chaos. He may be one of the forces that envelop the cosmos and is favored by the Olympians when they no longer wish to submit to Ananke (necessity). He may be Psyche’s companion on her journeys, or the Roman Cupid who strikes new lovers. In Platonic thought, he may be the child of Poros (resource) and Penia (poverty). His origins are not singular, yet his forces intensify encounter, fusion, bond, and creation.

Although Greco-Roman mythologies are the most widespread in the West, images of Eros can be accessed through many narratives and cosmogonies.

As a force of adhesion, this aligns with Chinese thought in hexagram 30 of the I Ching (Book of Changes): The Clinging (Adhering), represented by fire, speaks of life as bond and of how everything living must adhere to something.

“There is a place to arrive
A state, a posture
Where everything is completed.
Yes, there is a place, a joy
Where there are no more words
Only hands that meet
Without quarrel. There is a point
Of fusion, where everything embraces
And there is no more cold
In the soul, only the warmth
Of the sacred and of love
Adhering to what separates”

Viviane Mosé

In Yoruba mythology, Eros is not easily mapped onto a single orixá, yet erotic potency is visible in many images: in the beginnings of Exu and Pomba Gira, in Oxum’s beauty, and in Xangô’s fire.

In Dagara culture, to love is to listen — an invitation to the path of intimacy. In Guarani narratives, the moon god Djatchy mobilizes love and also invites us to rest. We can still expand our understandings of Eros by researching different cosmogonies and representations.

“To love is to want to learn, the Greeks teach us. To that learning we must add another, fundamental one, this time from Afro-Indigenous cultures: to love is not an individual emotion, but a collective one”

Renato Noguera

Alongside this diversity of images, when we speak of the eroticism of fusion we also deal with the suspension of limits, the suspension of morality, and the intensification of bodies. The erotic also threatens the illusion of control and is therefore constantly repressed in dogmatic, patriarchal, colonizing, and colonized societies. There is no structure for governing life, no exercise of power, that does not pass through the government of desires.

When that government is oppressive, it draws on many discourses to consolidate itself and colonize desiring bodies. Devitalized bodies are more easily dominated and depressed; reducing access to eroticism facilitates any domination. The opposite can be lived in the awakening of a political body that may be empowered through erotic freedom.

“The erotic is that core within me. When released from its intense, constricting shell, it flows through my life, coloring it with the kind of energy that expands, sensitizes, and strengthens my whole experience. [...] Erotic wisdom empowers us”.

Audre Lorde

At the same time, alongside relations with life force and drive, eroticism also moves through our death drives. The very suspension of limits for fusion can flirt with little deaths (petite mort describes the orgasmic experience in French) and also reveal our lacks, especially when mixed with romanticism.

Breaking limits that once defined or outlined a body can touch human anguish, yet it can equally open space for the new and for what lies beyond our navel.

“Who is the true subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole”

Anne Carson

Another constant reflection in research on eroticism concerns the distinction between what is erotic and what is pornographic. That boundary will never be peaceful, and all manner of moral and aesthetic complication arises when separating one concept from the other. What is erotic for one may be pornographic for another — and we might ask what truly matters: whether erotic or pornographic production (in books, films, music, or any visual art) serves the empowerment of bodies or colonialist, patriarchal logic.

Finally (or to begin), erotic experience is also tied to processes of inquiry. Like researcher Anne Carson, “I would like to understand why these two activities — falling in love and coming to know — make me feel so alive. There is a kind of electricity in them. They resemble nothing else, yet they resemble each other. How?”.

erōtikós sets out to investigate that electricity that moves and ignites us. To reflect on eroticism as a source of resistance, social transformation, and transgression against what oppresses and disempowers us. To expand the cosmogonies of Eros in order to decolonize our bodies and, in Geni Núñez’s words, reforest our imagination and our desires.

May we have spaces for research and experimentation — and may our discoveries be poetic as well.