Jota Mombaça
A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1)
The performance title A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1) / Us Agreed Not To Die (FLAG #1) is taken from a short story by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, whose work addresses violence, resilience, and necropolitics with an Afro-diasporic lens. This artwork by Jota Mombaça articulates connections between black and trans people’s challenges and struggles. Mombaça points out that an ongoing genocide of these minorities underscores the established power structures, and their resistance is to survive. Brazil is one of the world’s most violent countries and has one of the highest rates of violence against LGBTQIA+ people. In the performance, Jota manufactures improvised knives with ordinary materials such as wood sticks, shoelaces, and shattered glass. During the process, the artist reads a collection of texts, evoking a plurality of voices of many origins and times. Through Jota’s voice (loudly projected while they take their time to select the sharpest piece of glass in an ritualistic manner), the writer’s bodies and memories are reclaimed, calling to the awakening of a country seemingly inured to crimes against the queer and black community. The work itself is about death and at the same time about life – living amid social death and the social policy of death. The work holds the memory of the artist’s action and circulates as a sort of collective amulet and an autonomous object carrying within it hordes of violently silenced voices.
Interdisciplinary and “non-disciplinary” artist Jota Mombaça (pronouns: she/they) defines themselves as a nonbinary travesti of color, Latin American slang that has been reappropriated by transfeminist activists and subjects as a local, political, gender identity. The term reflects the artist’s interest in the tensions between desires for opacity and drives toward self-preservation as experienced by radicalized trans artists.
Mombaça’s work stems from poetry, critical theory, queer studies, political intersectionality, anti-colonial justice, and the redistribution of violence. Their artistic research engages both the continuing traumas of the Transatlantic slave trade and the rapidly increasing impact of climate crisis. Driven by the tensions of these urgent subjects, their work traverses topics such as displacement, environmental racism, gender disobedience, and time travel. Mombaça’s earlier work investigated the relationship between monstrosity and humanity and the tensions between ethics, aesthetics, art, and politics in the knowledge productions of the global south. Through performance, critical fabulations, and situational strategies of knowledge production, the artist speculates on what comes after we dislodge the modern-colonial subject from its podium.