Raphael Daibert is one of the coordinators of the Cidade Queer /Queer City project which inspired our current exhibition and is a central part of it. Daibert lives and works in São Paulo as a researcher, cultural producer, artist and curator.

He is a founding member of Lanchonete.org, the organization behind Cidade Queer /Queer City.

Cidade Queer is an ongoing process of individual and public politicization. It explains from where the intense energy in queer communities emanates – at times in the form of conflict and questioning at the collision of communities and lived experiences.

Called alternately ball culture and the ‘House system’, the Ballroom community has as its epicenter NYC’s communities of color and took on new responsibility during the advent and continuance of the AIDS crisis in that location.  While eventually mainstreaming via modes of cultural and capital appropriation and popularizing around the world, one of the stimuli for Cidade Queer is to acknowledge the role of the Ballroom community as family structure in places sometimes twice the size of NYC, such as São Paulo, where the global media gaze may assume by default that Ballroom is ‘for fun’ rather than serving an essential function of political awareness and community-building, solidarity and public health sensitization.  In a meta sense Cidade Queer asks why we don’t know more about São Paulo’s AIDS and other crises in communities of color in São Paulo and other places outside of dominant culture’s habitude and access?

Was it the general corruption of Brazil’s political economy (including disparities in healthcare information and service provision along racial lines and upsurges in hateful crimes), resulting in the 2016 coup d’état? Was it the devaluation of the Brazilian Real, and the tandem rise of the evangelical bloc that begged urgent, new community strategies, organizational forms and cultural fronts manifesting as pedagogical approaches, public health campaigning, street protests, urban policy advocacy, and surveys of cultural practice?

The presence of these ‘ingredients’ constitute the phenomena to which the project Cidade Queer and the Explode! Residency responded. Its aspiration was the imagining-cum-making of a temporal counter-public, as documented in Danila Bustamante’s film Queer City.

After a screening of the 30 minute movie Raphael Daibert will discuss the challenges the queer community currently faces in São Paulo.

Tickets 4 Euro.