Jup do Bairro: Healing, Transgression and Body Without Judgment

For the artist,

Jup do Bairro

,

writing came as a need for self-assertion. Mainly to help her understand the changes linked to her body that were in dialogue with issues related to blackness, self-esteem and gender performance.

Multimedia artist, Brazilian, independent, self-taught, born in Capão Redondo, southwest region of São Paulo, started to compose at the age of thirteen, with no pretension of being an artist.

She began her career experiencing influences that passed between punk and anarchism, making zines from her writing, which later helped the artist to compose and decompose these lyrics and turn them into music.

Body and gender performance

At the age of 13, going through processes such as grief over the loss of her father, and through such difficult issues in a time of puberty where corporeal changes are so latent, her understanding of the body was that she still had no notion of blackness and gender performance, everything returned as guilt and feeling of ugliness.

According to the artist, she felt she had been born in a wrong body, ruled by the lack of information at the time. And with her Judeo-Christian upbringing, she ended up interpreting the situation as a form of punishment. This later caused her compositions to come through a research of body, blackness, and empowerment.

First written in a poetic way, encouraged by a group of anarchist punk friends, and also a reference of her father in adolescence, a personality of great importance in Jup's life. According to the artist, even shy and read as a stranger in her adolescence, she still affirmed her personality. She wore clothes of her brother, her mother, her father, considered herself a person out of the curve. It was when in high school, together with a creative group of friends, she was introduced to the fanzine, awakening her writing, and throughout her trajectory, she transmuted her poetry into music.

Trajectory

Jup has worked in an Internet House, in sale, in tennis court. As an artist, she performed in the São Paulo night artistic scene, performed together with the production company BadSista (a partnership that lasts until today in her record) for some years, went on tour with the album "Pajubá" together with the singer Linn da Quebrada, with great repercussion inside and outside Brazil. This partnership now continues on TV where they present the program ''TransMissão'', on Canal Brasil. In the talk show, the singers approach themes such as sexuality, gender and race when interviewing personalities.

Corpo sem juízo: A future that cries out

At 27, Jup do Bairro launches her debut EP: "Corpo sem juízo". She tells her life story, and transmutes her pain into power and healing. The EP was launched on digital platforms in June 2020. Being today a landmark in Brazilian contemporary art, it is a point for the future.

A future that cries out, and claims, and fights for life and its space in the world, with all the intellectual strength, genius, and ancestry of its people. The presence of the fat, Black, travesti* body (travesti is a gender identity, initially a pejorative term it has been reclaimed by Latin American travesti activists) from the periphery that dies, is born, reborn, and transmutes its pains. A healing process that starts from the inside out, from a biographical bias; not only from intimacy and history, body, memory, a finger in the wound, a necessary discomfort, or a watershed in Brazilian popular music.

There is also a new movement; a voice that becomes multiple, that we can identify, and that shows the real cut between gender, race, and class. Political consciousness as a way of claiming power.

“Corpo sem Juízo” (Body Without Judgment) is a point for the future of honor and Black glory.

Transgressão

We learn from ‘Transgressão’ (transgression) to seek our freedom from the moment we face our pains and loneliness, which is the change in which we live from our particularities.

An intimate change that runs through our body and mind; the loneliness of a body that flees from the patterns of centric white cisgenderism, crossed by its adversities, but still wants to fly.

What can a body without judgment

It brings up the question: "What can your body do? When we learn that there is no such thing as the right body, only our body. As the artist says in the lyrics:

"What can a body do without judgment? When we know that an abject body becomes an object body and vice-versa? We are not defined by nature as soon as we are born, but for the culture we create and are created. Sexuality and gender are open fields of our personalities, and we fill as we absorb elements from the surrounding world. We become women or men, we are not born anything, Perhaps we are not even born human. Under culture, the action of time, space, history geography, psychology, anthropology, we become something. Men, women, transgender, cisgender, heterosexuals homosexuals, bisexuals, and whatever else we want, we can or will be. What can your body do?''

All You Need Is Love

We feel in "All You Need Is Love" a more sensual energy, but if you listen carefully, you understand all the discussion that exists there about Black affectivity, with a cut of experience that starts from transvestility. When we Black people, from our individualities, have so much love to give, but we don't know what it is, we didn't have the opportunity to love and be friends, to have our happy ending so common for whiteness, here is the question: where is the love? Will I understand all the greatness when it finally comes? If I never had this reciprocity; if I am still learning to love myself?

Corre

In “Corre” , we enter a place of intimacy, a kind of final judgment, a look at the trajectory in a flow of hip-hop new school when one laughs not to cry in the face of violence, or early mourning.

The maturity that anticipates many Black children and adolescents for a matter of survival; we lack time, we always have to be suffocating our pains to move on, to work, to survive, and we need to start living.

When racism takes away from us early on, the possibility of looking with love, when we think our appearance is wrong, that our body is wrong, and we end up conforming to life without affectivity that starts from deeper violence, than the lack of affectivity of others.

Pelo Amor de Deize

Then we come to a very delicate point for the dissident population reflected in “Pelo Amor de Deize” (For The Love Of Deize), which is health, especially mental health, which is so denied to Black people without access.

Mainly the Black woman, cis, trans are conditioned to be a fortress, to endure everything, to never think that they can get sick, like Black people who live in a cult from a reality of scarcity to take care of their mind, body, and spirit? Depression and anxiety being the diseases of the century, how does the support reach those Black women and men who can never stop?

Luta Por Mim

We come across the reality of “Luta Por Mim” (Fight For Me), a track that ends the visual album with an extremely strong and important clip, where voices of Black mothers who lost their children to genocide in police actions are echoed, and the mother of Jup do Bairro participates alongside her, symbolizing this bond of love between Black mothers and the fear that all suffer from loss. It calls for a change in the structure of a sick, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and murderous society.

And today, in a pandemic, where the condition of the Black and poor in the face of mass unemployment are to die of hunger or COVID-19, where imprisonment and the prevailing politics are epistemicide and necropolitics, Black people naturalize the non-projection of a future. Because they fear not to live long, in Brazil, a country that kills more Black people, especially transgenders and travestis; "Luta Por Mim" becomes an anthem, an outcry, where despite the pain, we fight and nourish the hope of a future in which we can smile, love each other, and live.

A cry of struggle, resistance and denunciation

The track that guides the existence in a body without judgment, subject to violence. A scream of struggle, resistance and denunciation, which ends the ep, and was the first single released before the record. Only in the first version, it gains a longer duration, being introduced by a poem by the writer Conceição Evaristo, narrated by her. It deals precisely with trans/travestyphobia, and this place of pain and revolt of mothers when they lose their daughters in a violent and criminal way, because they are only themselves. In both versions, we hear a talk about the abuses of Matheusa Passarelli, a young artist who was brutally murdered in 2018 in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro.

Ep Corpo Sem Juízo was a work carried out through a collective financing, together with Felipa Damasco (artistic direction), BadSista (musical direction), Pininga (production), Thiago Felix (executive production) and Izabela Costa (press office).

Listen to Corpo sem Juízo Spotify Deezer Apple Music Tidal 

By Mirella Ferreira

Photos, courtesy Jup do Bairro