Sauna Lésbica by Malu Avelar with Ana Paula Mathias, Anna Turra, Bárbara Esmenia & Marta Supernova

When asked about Sauna lésbica [Lesbian Sauna], Malu Avelar promptly answers that it is not possible to think about her work without understanding her body and the place where she came from. Reviewing questions that pervade her identity markers, Malu highlights the ways in which she reacts to a territory that structually brutalizes, most of the time in a silent way, everything that is different from it. “Structured on a binary model of gender, this town forces people with other(ed) identities to live in a permanent state of alert and vulnerability.”¹ This act of silently inhabiting imminent death, her questioning about gay saunas – “what if there was a lesbian sauna?”² –, the encounters she had with other sapatão artists during the artistic residency PlusAfroT/ Germany,³ and her desire to settle her body were factors that led the artist to create this work.

This artwork – whose first edition took place in 2019, at Valongo Festival, in Santos, São Paulo – is relational, installative, and unapologetically presents a neon sign with the words: Sauna lésbica. It is crucial to remember that lesbianity long lived on policies of forgetting and silencing, and has been reclaimed in a collective and political sense. Based on negotiations and provocative actions by invited artists, Malu Avelar, along with Ana Paula Mathias, Anna Turra, Bárbara Esmenia, and Marta Supernova propose a collective project and turn the artwork into a space that is nurtured by the choreography of those who occupy it. It is a space organized around the desire for encounters that cross the visible and invisible limitations hindering dissident existences and shaping stereotypes. Through an exercise of abstraction and radical imagination, the installation tensions the contradictions of the identitarian policies, at the same time as it celebrates the presence of Black lesbians and sapatonas; ⁴ a space for listening, for fabulations, for the displacement of subjectivities, and for the performativity of the bodies in contact with the Sauna.

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Sauna Lésbica by Malu Avelar with Ana Paula Mathias, Anna Turra, Bárbara Esmenia, and Marta Supernova is a collective project that aims to transform the installation – which had its first edition presented at the Valongo International Image Festival in Santos, São Paulo, in 2019 – into a space to be choreographed by those who occupy it, a safe place and celebration for dissident bodies.

^{1. Malu Avelar in a conversation with the author.
². Ibid.
³. Among the participants of the PlusAfroT residency are Grace Passô, Mahal Pitta, Ana Paula Mathias, Lenna Bahule, Malú Avelar, Iagor Peres, Guinho Nascimento, and Rebeca Carapiá. Available at: amlatina.contemporaryand.com/ pt/editorial/plusafrot/. Last accessed June 2023.
⁴. Plural of sapatão: a Brazilian-specific identity in the lesbian spectrum of gender/ sexuality. See Barros, Bruna and Jess Oliveira. 2020. “Black Sapatão Translation Practices: Healing Ourselves a Word Choice at a Time”. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 14: 43–52. [t.n.]}