The Latin Grufti project encompasses the gothic facet of Talita Rauber's production, composed of songs, videos, performances, paintings, and graphic arts, such as album covers and zines. It is an investigation that articulates artistic practice and theory based on an ongoing authorial production since 2020, centered around a common axis: the Gothic.

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Along this trajectory, the term “gothic” refers to two distinct yet complementary fronts. The first refers to the Gothic (the Gothic), which is not a fixed category or limited to a specific period or genre. On the contrary, it is proposed here as the manifestation of a flexible set of thematic, narrative, visual, and sensible elements that provoke effects such as fear, anguish, and revolt, and that present characteristics such as the obscure, otherness, the supernatural, and the ambivalent. This flexibility, while challenging critique to find stable definitions, allows for its adaptation and re-actualization across distinct forms of art and cultural expression. Its origins date back to the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths, and to how these people were deemed less civilized and, therefore, an “other” to Western culture.

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From the 18th century to contemporaneity, its characteristics have expanded globally and artistically. They reverberate in other fields, such as cinema, music, visual arts, and culture, and are re-actualized in new works and new branches of critical studies. The works of the Latin Grufti project dialogue with these aspects: they function as both the trigger and the target of the production.

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The second front concerns the goth subculture (goth subculture), formed from the late 1970s onwards in the United Kingdom, whose expression occurred mainly in musical experimentalism and post-punk music, but also in fashion, makeup, behavior, and alternative modes of sociability. Melancholia and the feeling of decadence and a lost future were among the issues surrounding its emergence, which occurred approximately two centuries after the onset of Gothic Literature and appropriated many of its elements—which may lead the goth subculture to be considered one of the reverberations of the Gothic. This subculture emerges as a field of appropriation and resignification of the literary and cinematic Gothic, reorganizing its references. It articulates a specific imaginary that involves the obscure, the macabre, the somber, the valorization of the feminine, ambiguity, and emotional expression.

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The Latin Grufti project aims, therefore, to dialogue with these two gothic fronts by articulating elements of the Gothic with aspects of the goth subculture. Furthermore, it inserts itself into this panorama as a singular case of reception and reinterpretation of the Gothic in the Latin American context. The choice of the term “Latin” in the project's name accentuates this geographical and cultural displacement, situating the Gothic in a continent marked by colonial contradictions, inequalities, and catastrophes. ​

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Excerpt from the Introduction of the Master's dissertation

LATIN GRUFTI: THE GOTHIC AS TRIGGER AND TARGET IN THE PRODUCTION BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND MUSIC