This dissertation concerns the relationship between artists Hélio Oiticica and Jack Smith in the bustling atmosphere of 1970 s New York. Even though Smith is little know in Brazil, he was an important artist in New York s underground culture, often pointed as one of the forerunners of performance art and expanded cinema. During his first months in New York (1970-1978), Oiticica wrote to his friends about how perplexed he was at Smith and his work, comparing him to characters and manifestations that were part of his sphere, such as actor Mario Montez and the Teatro do Ridículo. Departing from the Brazilian artist s letters and Jack Smith s files, this research investigates how their relationship has developed in personal and professional terms. Rather than looking for points of similarity or difference, this dissertation aims to put the work of these artists in friction - from their holes, absences, apertures and gaps. In this sense, their meeting will be the starting point for the discussion both of questions in their own work and of the relationship each of them has established with archival practices, the expansion of exercises on the possibilities of gender and sexuality, as well as reflections and projects derived from their claims against conventional cinema. In addition to Oiticica s best known works, such as Cosmococa - program in progress (19730-1974) and the article Mario Montez, tropicamp (1971), this thesis will analyze some of Jack Smith`s works and documents, such as an unpublished script he wrote in Rio de Janeiro in 1966, called Carnaval in Lobsterland.