Noelia Le Shalá

Our creative practice takes place in the street, in the transvestite nighttime experience and in the singing on buses. We live through the day and the night, irreconcilable spaces for a heterosexual dictatorship that opposes light to darkness, the rational to the irrational. Thus, in the crossings of day and night we finds a resistance.

The activism we carry out creates possibilities to question the prevailing social order, to denounce our memory of colonial oppression, to speak of our dead, to make our transvestite/fag/queer memories visible, as abject identities to a regime of light. Our politics does not oppose sex work and prostitution to a possibility of a questioning, of an autonomy of the established order, to a feminist historical reflection that de-stigmatizes a transvestite experience without sanitizing it, but valuing its knowledge and its memory of the submerged economy that supports this capitalist system.

We understand the bus as an anti-scenario, as a space beyond the intellectual artistic elite, as a space of popular community pedagogy that we have to snatch from the evangelical communities that enrich themselves by encouraging their discourse in the public transport of the poor areas or Santiago. The antipedagogy that we propose has been built by developing ourselves as prostitutes, "micro" (bus) singers, presenting ourselves in the marika scenario, but without abandoning the philosophical reflections that lead us to build a pedagogical practice that we carry out day by day in our everyday life. Clients, friends, neighbors, thesis students and public transport passengers.

Bandmember Noelia reflects in her poem:

"When they diagnose us with HIV, they remind us of death. Which is not very different from when we tell our beloved that we are fags because in their minds they assimilate it with death, because if poverty or disease doesn’t kill us, a cold-blood male will do it in the street. I resist the idea that I bring plagues, as the evangelicals tell us, I resist to repress my sexuality to the norm, to monogamy. What is being sick? I resist that my eyes only see normality and abnormality, I resist feeling guilty”