“We Are Here to Dream New Worlds”: Crushing Colonialism Speaks at EuroPride 2025

“Let me begin with queerness. Not as an identity, but as a cosmological principle.

In many Indigenous communities, mine included, gender was never fixed. The Guarani-Kaiowá understand existence through multiplicity. Queerness is not new. It was violently erased and must now be re-remembered.

Before the Church, before psychiatry, colonialism and biologics, before gender clinics—there were rituals, masks, dreams, plants, and spirits. And there were people who walked between the worlds—what today we might call queer.

But queerness was not marginal. It was central to cosmology. The ones who transgressed boundaries were often those who carried spiritual knowledge, because only those who walk between worlds can speak the languages of transformation.

What coloniality called abomination, our ancestors called medicine.

So when we speak of Pride, we must ask: Whose pride? Whose cosmology?

Because if Pride is just another national performance, it risks reproducing the same systems we claim to resist. Instead, I propose that Pride must be re-rooted in sovereignty—not the sovereignty of the state, but of the earth, the spirits, and the vibrating body.

Let me now speak of vibration. Knowledge is beyond systems of power—it’s transmission: through the drum, through the breath, through the trembling of the chest when a song arrives from the forest.

Vibration is epistemology.

The European Enlightenment told us that to know is to see, to measure, to classify. But what if knowing is to feel, to resonate, to tremble?

We must move from illumination to vibration. From the light of reason to the echoes of ritual. From visibility to resonance.

Ritual is not performance. It is a technology of remembering. It is how we realign with the unseen. Every step we dance, every beat we drum, every breath we chant—it is not expression. It is knowledge in motion. It is sovereignty embodied. It is a refusal of the colonial sensorium.

And that is why the queer Indigenous body is feared. Not because it is incomprehensible, but because it refuses to be disciplined. It vibrates beyond the binaries, beyond the borders, beyond the colonial metrics of reality.

The text “Deus, uma travesti negra e indígena” by Guilherme Lima reminds us that epistemology is always political. That there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. That the logics of Enlightenment, of positivism, of rationalism, of objectivity, are not universal, but colonial impositions.

We are performing an epistemic insurrection. We are saying that knowledge can no longer come only from the university, the lab, the law, the textbook.

It must come from the forest, from the flesh, from the fragment, from the noise.

So we call for an aesthetic of refusal. It is about learning from the margins, from what was discarded as impure. To decolonize knowledge, we must get dirty. We must touch what Enlightenment told us not to touch. We must feel what the Church called sin. We must speak with the dead.

What does this mean for Pride?

It means that instead of a parade down a state-sponsored avenue, Pride must become a ritual of return to nowhere lands. A return to the body. To the land. To the dead. To the silence before language.

Pride should not be about visibility in the colonial state. It should be about disappearance from its gaze. Not to assimilate, but to vibrate beyond its reach.

To gather. To share food. To sing in our tongues. To reclaim the dirty, the disobedient, the divine.

Visibility is not liberation if it is policed by respectability. Liberation is when we no longer have to translate ourselves for the dominant gaze. When we live in languages not yet invented.

So I end by returning to where I began: with the idea of world-building. In Guarani cosmology, the world was not created once. It is always being created, through ritual, through relation, through resistance.

To be queer and Indigenous today is not only to survive. It is to re-world. It is to compose new cosmologies. It is to heal through rage, to love through ritual, to study through vibration, and to know through não saber—through not-knowing, through mystery, through breath.

Let our Pride be a chant.
Let it be in Guarani. In Kimbundu. In Yoruba. In silence.
Let it not ask for recognition—let it remember what was never meant to be forgotten.
We are not here to be included.
We are here to haunt the systems that tried to erase us.
We are here to dream new worlds into being.

M’bae. E muito obrigada.”