Wellington Gadelha

In this solo, Wellington Gadelha has mobilised his experience as a dancer and militant, in his native favela near Fortaleza, to denounce techno-racial inequalities and the sharing of territories resulting from segregations. Marrying the poetic with the political, he sees his black, male body as a site of subjectivation exposed to daily violence, a “Russian-roulette-body” in his own words. Gente de Lá thus introduces an urgent atmosphere, capable of making these struggles visible, and more generally to establish an anticolonial counter-narrative. In a total performance, bringing in sound, music, props, space, time and lighting, Wellington Gadelha approaches each element as a meaningful materiality, with which he engages a gestural dialogue. The piece connects different actions together, with forms of dissidence, oppositions and tensions, which provide him with an opportunity to redefine frontiers that attempt to enclose him. In this forbidden game, he is the one who ends up pressing the trigger.

Wellington Gadelha is a Brazilian artist and militant, and founder of the platform Afrontamento (AfFROnting). As a performer, visual and sound artist, he mobilises both his body and technology to express his political-ethical preoccupations. He closely collaborates with collectives on the themes of human rights, peripheral cultures and black youth. After appearing in a large number of festivals, in Brazil and abroad, Wellington Gadelha was awarded the Rumos Itaú Cultural prize with Gente de Lá.