STA!
STA! would be the video clip of "Dama de Pau", one of the most famous songs of Solange, I am open! (STA!), a queer baile funk project born in Brazil ten years ago and currently based in Vienna. But during the process it became a more fluid and experimental visual essay on queer kinship, inter-sectional communities and the power of collective joy against the perpetuation of terror in the experience of queer migrants. More than focusing on the project, STA! is a film about the affective network that is needed to hold such a project; it is about building community through collaborative work, and it is about creating spaces for the celebration of our lives, histories, voices and bodies.
The film was shot in one of the Thursday´s night gatherings at Freiräumchen, a space in the oldest queer project-building of Vienna, Türkis Rosa Lila Villa. It is a space attended mostly by queer migrant people who go there for dancing, flirting, drinking and for being among each other. Instead of a representation of those gatherings, the film offers a poetical and political statement on how queer lives sustain each other through daily conviviality. And it does that from a situated position, in the sense that the biggest part of the artists involved in making the film are part of the same community that is filmed. STA! becomes then a device of self-representation and an incitement of self-love and collective joy. More than a film, it´s a celebration. An excuse for being happy together. (Jota Mombaça)
STA!
2017
Austria
6 min