Daniela Andrade and Fern
© Photo Credits: Fern, 2026.
p(B)ajubá e a proteção de pessoas trans e travestis
— Montreal Monochrome XI — TRANSIENT
Keynote Address with Daniela Andrade and Fern.
Friday, September 4, 2026 at 5:30 PM. Conversation in French but live translation to English will be available. Free and open to all.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference series for Indigenous, Black, and artists and cultural workers of color, organized by articule's Fabulous Committe. This 11th edition, which will take place from September 2-6, 2026, will expand to welcome guests from across Canada to explore our theme: TRANSIENT. Details about this edition of Montreal Monochrome and the full program.
In this conversation, Daniela Andrade and Fern revisit the role of p(B)ajubá in the formation of LGBTQIAPN+ identities in Brazil while exploring what it means to preserve and protect its travesti legacy today. Originating within Afro-trans communities and Candomblé terreiros before spreading throughout Brazil's LGBTQIAPN+ communities as a whole, p(B)ajubá is far more than a coded dialect. It is a living archive of survival, solidarity, resistance, and collective memory whose continued transmission owes much to the political, archival and cultural work of activist Jovanna Baby.
Taking p(B)ajubá as both a language and a way of understanding the world, the conversation examines what it means to protect trans and travesti communities—not only from physical violence and institutional exclusion, but also from cultural erasure, extractive collaborations, and the appropriation of marginalized knowledge. Drawing on their respective activist and artistic practices, Daniela Andrade and fern reflect on how ethical collaborations can ensure that the communities who have produced this knowledge remain at the center of its interpretation, circulation, and transmission. Rather than approaching P(B)ajubá as a linguistic curiosity, they present it as a living technology of care that has enabled generations of trans and travesti people to communicate, imagine, organize, and survive beyond colonial systems of meaning.
As a multifaceted and rhizomatic phenomenon, p(B)ajubá intersects human rights, subaltern cultures, body emancipation, migration, spirituality, semiotics, racial and cultural mixing, and collective memory. Its vocabulary, codes, and ways of producing meaning reveal forms of knowledge that have long existed outside dominant institutions while continuing to shape everyday practices of resistance and mutual support.
Bringing together oral histories, artistic research, and lived experience, the conversation returns to a series of pressing questions: How can we protect the lives of marginalized people while working with their cultural legacies? Capitalism has repeatedly built institutions, markets, and cultural value from the knowledge and labor of marginalized communities, only to erase or render those same communities invisible. How do we resist reproducing this process within our own communities and institutions? In revisiting p(B)ajubá, the discussion argues that safeguarding this linguistic heritage is inseparable from safeguarding the lives, agency, and futures of all communities that continue to create, transform, and keep it alive.
Artists
Daniela Andrade is a trans activist with a degree in Portuguese language and a postgraduate specialization at the intersection of language and technology. She founded Transempregos, a digital platform dedicated to mitigating the effects of transphobia in the Brazilian job market. She has participated in numerous lectures, conferences, and initiatives focused on the depathologization of trans identities and bodies in Brazil. She previously served as Director of the São Paulo LGBT Youth Forum, was a member of the Sexual Diversity Commission of the Brazilian Lawyers Association (OAB) – Osasco, and of the collective Feminismo sem Demagogia. Today, she continues her work as an independent activist. Daniela lives in Montreal since 2019, where she is actively involved in the community, advocating for access to basic living conditions and support for neurodivergent people, trans children, and immigrants.
fernando belote (FERN) is a Brazilian bicha/queer, neurodivergent artist whose practice operates at the intersection of art and language. Drawing from memories of dissidence, displacement, and domestic violence, FERN revisits the legacy of Brazilian LGBTQIAPN+ communities through a Marxist and emancipatory lens. Their work is deeply informed by P(B)ajubá, an Afro-trans dialect transmitted to them while growing up in Brazil between the ages of 13 and 19, through both street life and spaces of refuge in terreiros of Candomblé. FERN's multidisciplinary practice spans video, performance, ceramics, photography, zine-making, and papermaking. Through these mediums, they investigate language as a technology of survival and collective memory while challenging the colonial syntax and systems of meaning-making that continue to shape how bodies, identities, and communities are understood.
Current Schedule
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Opening Reception & Performances
— Starting at 5:30 PM.
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Threading Frequencies: Longtable discussion
— At 1:30 PM: Featuring artist-run centre leaders: Abedar Kamgari (SAVAC), Sanaa Humayun (Hamilton Artists Inc.), and Alana Traficante (Gallery 44), co-facilitated by researchers Madeline Collins and Suzanne Morrissette (OCAD University).
Open Discussion
— At 3 PM: Open Discussion, continuing on with the themes from the long table discussion all participants are invited to contribute to an open discussion.
Keynote Address
— At 5:30 PM. In English but live translation to French will be available.
Performances
— At 7 PM: Dani Carter — SWIRL/SADDLE.
Friday, September 4, 2026
Keynote Address
— At 5:30 PM: Keynote Address featuring Daniela Andrade & Fern — p(B)ajubá e a proteção de pessoas trans e travestis. In French but live translation to English will be available.
Performances
— At 7 PM. Details to come.
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Workshops
—At 3 PM: Sabina Gámez Ibarra — Desire Paths
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Terms and Conditions: a workshop and discussion
— Starting at 1:30 PM: Presented by Collective Collective and COco - Centre for Community Organizations.
Three artists will present their installation works during Montréal Monochrome: Maya Amoah, Nathalie Batraville, and Anna J. McIntyre.
TRANSIENT
TRANSIENT refers to what circulates under pressure: diasporic bodies, minoritized languages, unstable archives, trans/queer and racialized practices that resist regimes of fixation, measurement, and categorization. Against colonial, institutional, and statistical logics that flatten difference into acronyms, metrics, or singular narratives, TRANSIENT foregrounds relational, embodied, and collective forms of knowledge. It creates a space where identity is understood as a process rather than a stable fact, where memory is activated through use and gesture, and where movement becomes a strategy for survival, care, and continual remaking.
TRANSIENT names a situated condition shaped by movement, constraint, and political timing. It is neither a temporary state nor mobility for its own sake, but a mode of existence formed in the in-between: between appearance and disappearance, inside and outside, visibility and erasure. Perhaps we all find ourselves there—in the liminal, fuzzy, and fluid—either momentarily or temporarily. What have we been doing in the interim.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference organized by articule's Fabulous Committee (anti-oppression). It addresses the misrepresentation and under-representation of Indigenous and racialized people in the current Montreal arts scene. The event aims to imagine and nurture new and existing connections, solidarities and friendships between Indigenous artists, thinkers, cultural workers and racialized allies. Artists, cultural workers, researchers, community organizers and others are invited to apply. The selected projects may take the form of workshops, round tables, debates, collective works, actions in the public space, interventions, performances, demonstrations, lightning gatherings, among others.
The Fabulous Committee is a space for Black, Indigenous and/or racialized articule members, as well as Black, Indigenous and/or racialized queer and/or trans members, to come together, to have a space to care for each other, to exchange ideas, to share their practice and to see art together. The activities of the Fabulous Committee change according to the needs and desires of the members.
This year’s edition of Montreal Monochrome is made possible, in part, by the Government of Canada, and by the support of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
The Canadian Race Relations Foundation is committed to building a national framework for the fight against racism in Canadian society. The CRRF will do this through knowledge-sharing and community support in the pursuit of equity, fairness, social justice and systemic change.