Jota Mombaça

Jota Mombaça (1991, Natal, Brazil) defines themselves as a “non-binary bicha, born and raised in the Northeast of Brazil.” Jota researches the relationship between humanity and monstrosity, investigates the pertinence of queer as a category in the Brazilian context, and tensions the constitution of subjectivities and marginalities in the centers and peripheries of capitalism. In their performances and writings, their body challenges the cisgender male heterosexual whiteness that is imposed as a universal standard. Jota exposes the violent politics of death and of invisibility to which the racialized bodies were submitted throughout the course of colonial history, which currently persist under the fiction of racial democracy.

In the performance A gente combinamos de não morrer [Us Agreed Not to Die] (2018 - ), which borrows its title from a short story by Conceição Evaristo, Mombaça constructs rudimentary artisanal knives from precarious materials like tree branches, shards of broken glass and red string. The work exposes the violence and the constant eminence of danger which beset the bodies that define the norm, revealing their need to find forms of response and resistance. For Mombaça, “the future is a privilege for only a few,” making it necessary to create other tactics of survival.