This proposal explores representations of tattoo culture in the Music Television Brasil archive, focusing on the 1990s and 2000s — a period of intense cultural and aesthetic transformation in Brazil and the years during which the channel was active. It investigates how MTV Brasil’s programming and music videos catered to youth audiences engaged with alternative aesthetics and bodily expressions, especially tattoos, positioning the network as a key player in legitimizing and popularizing tattoo culture in the country.
The study is grounded in the hypothesis that, by featuring tattooed bodies—both in music videos and among its VJs—MTV contributed to the visibility and cultural recognition of a practice still marked by stigma and marginality. It introduces the concept of “tattooed gestures” to analyze music videos as an emerging audiovisual language and tattoos as bodily inscriptions that function as visual pedagogy, shaping youth identities, styles, and senses of belonging.
The core corpus will comprise over 35,000 Betacam tapes from the MTV Brasil collection, currently held by Editora Abril. Given existing restrictions and preservation challenges, the project proposes an archival intervention that combines institutional dialogue with public campaigns for digitization and access. Complementary material will be drawn from recordings available on the Internet Archive.
This study aligns with the debate on archives as interventions in problematic pasts, examining the tattoo as a historically racialized and subcultural mark. By exploring how tattooed bodies circulated on MTV Brasil and how these representations helped reshape norms around youth and embodiment, the study underscores the value of audiovisual archives as critical tools for understanding cultural change. It also highlights the underexplored significance of the MTV Brasil archive for the broader history of Latin American media and youth cultures.
