With her mouth smeared with red lipstick, contrasting with her always stubbled beard, Gilda was a transvestite and homeless person in Curitiba, who became known in the 70’s and 80’s for being irreverent and a striking figure.
She would ask for a coin from those who passed by the sidewalk of Rua XV, better known as Boca Maldita, and whoever didn’t give her, tried to steal a kiss. In addition to these humorous episodes, Gilda’s life was also marked by violence.
To honor this important character from Curitiba and show both sides of the story, the artist Guilherme Jaccon conceived a performance that will be presented next Saturday (02), in the city center.
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The event will start at 3:30 pm, in Praça Zacarias, and then, in a procession, participants and artists will go to Boca Maldita, the place where Gilda became known. At the last moment, a bronze plaque will be placed in her honor.
The proposal was awarded in the category of urban interventions of the 67th Salão Paranaense de Arte Contemporânea, of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of Paraná – an unprecedented category in the award until then.
Jaccon has researched Gilda’s history since 2015, focusing on the city’s public memory and the records that institutions have (or don’t have) about the life and legacy of the transvestite, an icon of the local LGBTQIA+ community.
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Guilherme also surveyed initiatives by artists and collectives that sought, over time, to reinforce a memory that was almost antagonistic to the official one through posters, publications, poems, plays, among other productions that paid tribute to the transvestite of Boca Maldita.
“My question with Gilda is to place her in the official memory of the city and the question of my work is to see to what extent official institutions make the history (of the people and the city) so homogeneous”, says Guilherme Jaccon.
Courtship
The procession will be composed of several carnival blocks from Curitiba, such as Saí Do Armário and Me Dei Bem, Bloco Malinski-se and guest artists. The group has been working for a few weeks on the process of putting to music poems written at different times about Gilda, transforming them into sambas, plot, marches and Carnival screams.
Source: BdF Paraná
Editing: Ana Carolina Caldas
