Notes on Travecacceleration

Note on Travecacceleration (2021) sees Ode’s 2020 essay Note on Travecacceleration in the form of moving image and oral essay. Ode considers blackness side by side with travestilidade, ‘since both my black identity and my travesti identity makes me and other people like me be considered subhuman: however, we also reinvent ourselves as inhuman and antihuman in efforts to advance with, through and beyond the modes of repression and alienation present in capitalism.’

Download the full transcript here.

Sumé Aguiar (Rio de Janeiro, 1997) develops a work that draws from her research of what she calls her dissonant ‘corpa’ – a neologism created by the feminine inflection of the noun ‘corpo’, meaning ‘body’. Her film Escritas ao entorno da carne [Written around the flesh] (2019) showcases the embodiment of different poses that take place both in the middle of the city and into the woods, raising questions with regards to the creation of memories and the unfolding of subjectivity. This way, Sumé desires to search for other means of cognitive stimulation.

Urias (Uberlândia, 1994) moves issues of gender, politics, history and semiotic studies into the music industry in Brazil. In Racha (2020), she reveals the ways by which points-of-view and discourses on colonial images might relate to travesti bodies. Showing how the cognitive and discursive instruments and traditions that are present in our everyday lives affect our current relationships and actions, she questions whether such signs could be overcome by the gesture of consciously embracing them in the service of liberation.

The word ‘racha’, meaning ‘crack’, is a pajubá* slang for ‘cisgender woman’. The symbolism of spiders, in Brazil, alludes to the vagina; however, a species of spider also gave its name to a mass genocide of travestis in the 1980s, the hidden Operação Tarântula.

Jota Mombaça (Natal, 1991) works with writing and performance practices that address issues of violence, resilience and necropolitics. This piece results from a speech in which the artist investigates what it could mean to live in indefinition — a concept that arose from her being questioned whether the crossings from which her work derives should always require a fixed stand point. “Not necessarily”, she answers, then goes on to propose that in a non-binary perspective, gender transition can be interpreted as an ontology of the diaspora: “a bodily place in movement”.

“Travesti” não se traduz! is an audio piece in Portuguese reworked into video format for the online portion of the exhibition. We encourage you to first sit back and listen and then read through the transcript in English. Download transcript in English here

Maria Clara Araújo is a transactivist and parliamentary advisor to Erica Malunguinho MP for PSOL/SP, graduated in pedagogy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo and researcher in curriculum theory with emphasis on anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies.

Without centralising practices of dehumanisation, but transmutation, OMEM (2020) is a study of the semiotics present in hormonal processes. Rendered as a core producer of identity, hormonal processes are built from prosthetic signs, engendering the fossilization of liquidities such as testosterone and estrogen. By disturbing the rigid binary destiny of the body cartography that is installed by the hormone, Aun makes room for the failure of this structure and distanciates her travesti identity from other subjective relations; in this work she focuses on desire and death.

Drawing on practices of post-porn, Kury creates an itinerary contrary to the passivity associated with the feminine. Her work puts in check the desire to disobey the systematic control of bodies that challenge the current genocidal scenario which is installed by the Brazilian State, its police force and public healthcare system. This work leads us to think in directions that purposefully deviate from the policing projects that shape the world we inhabit today as bodies that are denied the right to transition. It leads us towards imagining fictions beyond what the pharmaceutical industry and Brazilian politics have instituted as a given formula.

Due to the ‘criminalisation’ implied by the term, the word ‘travesti’ becomes a limit, an invitation and an announcement of her blackness and gender. As Vitorino Brasileiro proposes by producing routes to freedom through transmutation, her body-flower becomes a form of survival in the face of colonial extermination. She summons us with Uma noite sem lua, aiming to be more than an effect of the pain in which we were imprisoned, more than the brutality used against us, and older than the deaths caused by murder.