Malleable meaning

This paper examines the process of recontextualization of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–1515) as a dance performance choreographed by Compagnie Marie Chouinard and presented at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) in 2018. It shows how both source and target texts have been interpreted by scholars and the public in relation to the discursive framings offered by the physical space of their location and their historical contexts. While the first alleged locations of the painting have led the art historians Stefan Fischer (2016) and Hans Belting (2018) to relate it either to the traditional moral precepts of Christianity or to the new voyages of colonization, the location of Chouinard’s dance performance at the heart of the most visible inscription of Portuguese colonial past, the district of Belém, created a parallel friction with the moral interpretation offered by the CCB. In analyzing how the process of recontextualization can activate dissonant discursive frames, I propose recontextualization as the operation of exposing the source text’s ambiguities and foregrounding the malleability of meaning-material.