QUEER FEMINIST BRAZILIAN PUZZLE Excerpts of a conversation with Thelma Bonavita Como clube was based in the historic downtown of São Paulo Brazil, in the first modernist building of the city. “Edifício Esther” was built in 1930, during a period when Brazil was flourishing out of colonialism. As an offspring of a modernist utopia, this pre-Alphaville building combined commercial, entertainment, and residential needs. Its nightclub Oasis Assis Chateaubriand aka Chatô has drawn MASP* personalities like amongst others Pietro Maria Bardi(co-founder)or Lina Bo Bardi (architect). Di Cavalcanti, a well-known modernist painter - as legend has it - resided on the ninth floor, flat 905, which was one of Como clube’s late locations. After two decades of dictatorship, the building - a relict of an emancipated time - was in a depressing state: its infrastructure was vandalized and misused and its people cracked and forgotten. What once was Oasis had become the Executive Bar, a striptease and sex-bar which had lost the connection to its inhabitants or the history of its building. With many street kids, prostitution and drugs it became a segregated playground for sexual liberation during the 80s: for gays, lesbians and transgender people, exposed to high life threats and risks. Slightly elevated through the condition of revitalization the area slowly changed during the early 2000s. In 2010, before the second coup d' state that darken Brazil until now, Como clube opened its doors, with the guideline “creation before the project”. In other words, it was exploring and proliferating how creative processes can be supported in their own and experimental ways. Considering the historical background and its realities around the building, merging it with Como clubbers' interest it became a queer art-related environment generating unplanned effects and encounters extended into time, gender and feminism. “Como_clube can and should be seen as a precedent (there are a few oases in the desert), creating the possibility of opening gaps in space, time, and corporeal experience… It is a shrill burlesque scream for difference, a belief that experimental artistic practices still have the power to denaturalize, and de-territorialize the givens to produce other existential territories. Imagination is a performative activity–imaginaction–, meaning a political, clinical and (aesth)ethical intervention in the world.” Amilcar Packer (http://terremoto.mx/article/comoclube/)
photo: Renato Paschoaleto https://issuu.com/thelmabonavita/docs/poppornets.compressed