The Portuguese Platform for Performing Arts is a biennial event where the most relevant works of Portuguese performing arts are presented to a hundred national and international programmers, curators, and artistic directors. It has been the most important platform for the internationalisation of Portuguese performing arts.
“My Profane Holy Body” is a performance by TransParadise’s founders, Keyla Brasil and Freda Paranhos, that investigates corporeal and gender insurgencies through the mimesis of their own lives. The travesti identity is a South American identity, still denied by gender coloniality, which operates the dehumanisation of individuals who do not fit within hierarchical binaries. As confirmed by Letícia Nascimento (2021), travestis are outsiders to gender, often having a place denied within feminism, thus needing to negotiate socio-cultural relations beyond cis-hetero-patriarchal power dynamics.
Becoming has always been, and continues to be, a contested territory. Becoming as a multiple field, existing within a border between possibility and desire, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (2012), is about trans-formation. In “My Profane Holy Body”, performer Keyla Brasil elaborates on subjectivities related to TRANSforming, where becoming-trans and multiple femininities relate to pleasure and pain.
This performance was created to provoke reflection within European cisgender identity, and it was much more than a piece intended to be sold or captured by white, cisgender European curators for their home countries. It was a manifesto that trans, migrant art is untameable, uncontrollable, and irrevocably present. Unlike other selections, the performance was not purchased, nor did it have a journey through Europe after the exhibition. Guess why?
References
Deleuze, G.; Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus — Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2. Vol. 4. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012 (2nd edition).
Nascimento, L. Transfeminism. Feminismos Plurais. Sueli Carneiro; Jandaíra. São Paulo, 2021.