Queer City: Stories from São Paulo

Runtime: October 19, 2017 – January 08, 2018
Curators: Uta Stapf, Dr. Kevin Clarke
Opening: 19. Oktober 2017, 19:00 Uhr

One of the most important queer communities of the world lives in São Paulo, the biggest city of South America with more than 20 million inhabitants in theentire metropolitan region. This community is impressively diverse with regard to ethnic groups, more so than most queer communities in Europe or North America. How does the co-existence of these highly diverse groups work in São Paulo, in the past and today? How affected are they by racism, how free are they, and what possibilities of expansion do they have, in a time when Christian Evangelicals gain more and more political power in Brazil and use that power to shut down e.g. exhibitions about queer art, as happened in September 2017? What can we learn from a range of urban processes – social movements, artistic interventions and otherwise – about the building of a future queer community? Who are the protagonists of the current Brazilian LGBTIQ* movement, and how are they different from those of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as seen in the documentary film São Paulo in Hi-Fi by Lufe Steffen? Why does São Paulo have a state funded Museum for Sexual Diversity since 2012 that’s directly modeled on Berlin’s Schwules Museum*? And why is Saint Tibira do Maranhão the first indigenous queer martyr of Brazil?

Press photos

The press photos can be used exclusively to report on the exhibition “Queer City: Stories from São Paulo”, credits included: Queer City, Schwules Museum