Nilo Ybyraporã: transcestral instapoetry
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
In 2018 and 2019 Nilo Nūhatê Ybyraporã won the Brazilian national slam championship - Slam BR. In 2019 he won two other slam competitions, at two international literary parties in the state of Rio de Janeiro - Flip’s and Flup's Poetry Slam. At the time he went under the name of Piê, or Pieta Poeta. Since then, he has published books and zines, has made paintings, written plays, composed songs and made biojewelry. Since 2021, he has been using his Instagram account as an online archive for his poetry. He posts an image, or a collection of images, in a carousel post, and in the caption he posts a poem that goes with that image. Unlike other Brazilian poets that came from slam, such as Luz Ribeiro and Carol Dall Farra, who, during the pandemic, started producing Instagram, TikTok and YouTube videos with their spoken poetry juxtaposed to a selection of images, in short or long poetry films, Nilo Ybyra has used social media in a rather old-fashioned manner. During these past years, he has documented his gender transition on Instagram, going from Piê (already a pen name) to Nilo, while simultaneously documenting his reconnection with his afro-indigenous heritage, writing poems that thematize the relationship between his body and nature, his body and the city of Belo Horizonte, where he lives, in a movement he and other artists have called transcestral. This paper aims to discuss the relationship between technology, social media, electronic literature and transcestrality. My goal is to dispute the understanding we have of a series of divides such as electronic/ analog, written/ spoken, digital/ physical, technological/ ancestral, which organize our debate around the literature and the art produced in the present - a sort of binary thinking which is highly complicated by Nilo Ybyra’s production.
Nilo Ybyraporã: transcestral instapoetry
Narratives & Worlds
In 2018 and 2019 Nilo Nūhatê Ybyraporã won the Brazilian national slam championship - Slam BR. In 2019 he won two other slam competitions, at two international literary parties in the state of Rio de Janeiro - Flip’s and Flup's Poetry Slam. At the time he went under the name of Piê, or Pieta Poeta. Since then, he has published books and zines, has made paintings, written plays, composed songs and made biojewelry. Since 2021, he has been using his Instagram account as an online archive for his poetry. He posts an image, or a collection of images, in a carousel post, and in the caption he posts a poem that goes with that image. Unlike other Brazilian poets that came from slam, such as Luz Ribeiro and Carol Dall Farra, who, during the pandemic, started producing Instagram, TikTok and YouTube videos with their spoken poetry juxtaposed to a selection of images, in short or long poetry films, Nilo Ybyra has used social media in a rather old-fashioned manner. During these past years, he has documented his gender transition on Instagram, going from Piê (already a pen name) to Nilo, while simultaneously documenting his reconnection with his afro-indigenous heritage, writing poems that thematize the relationship between his body and nature, his body and the city of Belo Horizonte, where he lives, in a movement he and other artists have called transcestral. This paper aims to discuss the relationship between technology, social media, electronic literature and transcestrality. My goal is to dispute the understanding we have of a series of divides such as electronic/ analog, written/ spoken, digital/ physical, technological/ ancestral, which organize our debate around the literature and the art produced in the present - a sort of binary thinking which is highly complicated by Nilo Ybyra’s production.
Bio
Daniela Silva de Freitas is a professor of Literatures in English at Universidade Federal de Alfenas, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her research investigates the transformation caused by issues of gender, race, class and nation upon classic literary form, especially in Brazilian and U.S. contexts. She is especially interested in hip-hop, slam poetry, music culture and other literary practices off the page.