By Sonia Corrêa
Uýra Sodoma is a non-binary Amazonian performance artist. She is intersectional in every sense. In one of her multiple layers, Uýra is a descendant of Mundurukus; in another, she is Emerson, a biologist who specializes in amphibians. In a 2018 interview, Emerson recalled that in 2016, when Brazil was experiencing a coup, “it was decisive that Uýra existed.”
The art of Uýra Sodoma is plastic, changeable, and transitory. It is both destructive and regenerative, as are the continuous transformations of the humid and profusive rainforest ecology. It replicates and alters the forces and forms of the land where it was born. Its continuous exploration is not driven by the desire to dominate but by the charm of reimagining. The forms that Uýra Sodoma creates from her own body are entangling and dazzling. At their center, a keen eye digs and reveals what lies hidden beneath the rubble of colonial conquest and its endless history. It finds and illuminates the remnants of what seemed to have disappeared in spaces where other eyes see only homogenization and destruction. It changes catastrophes into brief traces of enchantment and converts what seemed beautiful to us into signs of forgotten catastrophes.
Uýra Sodoma has recently, and deservedly, won the Pipa Prize. She came into the world when the first cyclone of the political turn to the ultra-right was sweeping through our land. Today, her adorned body and her identitary hybridity evoke the unusual presences of Célia Xakriabá, Sonia Guajajara, Érika Hilton, and Duda Salabert in the National Congress and also the singing performances of Pablo Vittar and Liniker, also awarded unprecedented international prizes in 2022. Her ancestral queer forest art coincides with the feelings, desires, and urgencies of the imagined community called Brazil during this crossing, which is just beginning, between the edge of the abyss and another shore where it will perhaps be possible to breathe again.
To learn more about the Art of Uýra Sodoma, read the article in Elástica Magazine and visit her Instagram profile.