After events being closed, political fight and police invasions, the party keeps on resisting, solidifying itself as underground’s headquarters in Campinas Text and interviews by Pedro Paulo Furlan.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
Campinas, 7PM. On September 21st, Bicuda opened its doors into their sixth birthday, celebrating the date - in the middle of a troubled year - besides it’s fully diverse public. Under the colorful LED lights and in front of the big screens, the night was lulled by a lot of music, with sets and headlining shows from some of the biggest names in Brazil’s underground scene, like Caio Prince, Cyberkills and Miss Tacacá.
Who got into the event without prior knowledge of the party’s context, wouldn’t guess that in less than a year, Bicuda, named after a fresh water fish, a notably hard catch, had already gone through a forced closing, been one of the main players in a huge political fight and also lost the support of Campinas’s city hall.
“It’s of great importance to the people around it, you know? We’re in this place, really opening up the opportunities and resisting all this chaos”, tells me Victin, the founder of the party, when I ask what makes him want to keep going.
Photography by Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko
One of the few underground spaces in the countryside of São Paulo, Bicuda exists, nowadays, as a living organism of resistance. In a place taken by right-wing politics, the party resists against political and popular advances, surviving under the mission of being a beacon for artists and queer people.
“We want to show that Campinas is a place where people can feel comfortable, where the freaks and the monsters are free to survive”, notes Mabel, one of the party's standout performers, besides being one of Bicuda’s producers.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
Obliteration of the Kardume and invasion of the waters
“I’ve always thought that this city needed an event that encouraged plurality and talked about self-expression”, says Victin, during our conversation about Bicuda. Born in 2018, the party, that came to be besides a radio for underground artists' releases, quickly became the place to find this diversity that Campinas needed.
Photography by Hyago C.
Throughout the years, the project, that started as clandestine parties in empty sheds, in the industrial zone of the city, started to spread to more and more environments, gathering sponsors and a growing group of regulars. After the pandemic, seeing Bicuda’s power, the team decided to open a cultural center besides the party: Kardume (meaning school of fish).
“Kardume’s purpose was to really create this space in the city, have a cultural center where we could hold events, have space for regional artists and that we could bring our project to a more cultural side”, explains Victin.
Photography by Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko
A space with a bar, open DJ station, workshops and cultural meetings, Kardume was a project that got a lot of people engaged, including artists that, nowadays, work inside Bicuda’s production team. Very politically significant, the space kept on growing besides the party until October 2023, when it was broken into and robbed.
“They got inside and stole everything”, tells me Victin, remembering what happened: “Literally everything - it was in an awful scale”. After that, besides the hardships that come with keeping a space like that open, the team decided to close Kardume, specially after the tragedy that was Bicuda’s fifth birthday festival, just a few months before.
On July 2023, the festival, celebrating five years of Bicuda, was all of a sudden closed by police forces - leading to financial debt and a judicial battle that is still being fought today.
Photography by Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko
With Linn da Quebrada, Irmãs de Pau, Paulete Lindacelva, Ramemes, Th4ys and more on the line-up, the event was planned to be the biggest the party had ever organized - and during it’s run “everything was so beautiful, so full, people all around”, tells me Deltinhu, one of Bicuda’s producers, that was present on the day it happened.
“After a while, the police started arriving and Victin kept going outside and coming back, but then there was a moment when the police really invaded the event”, he says: “They would say ‘You better get that over with before we get inside’, so I went to all the floors and stages and turned it all off”.
“The security guards started to throw people out, police was there, they kept saying that if everyone didn’t leave, they would come inside and start hitting people, it was really aggressive”, Victin points out.
Photography by Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko
According to Deltinhu, he went and turned off all three stages, telling everyone of the police’s presence, while watching the public run out of the event, confused and in panic. On the street, in front of the location, some of Bicuda’s performers came together to keep the positive energy, even through it all - Mabel was one of these.
“I’m a clown, I need to extract humor from everything”, the drag queen tells me, explaining that, through trying to calm people down, she was also trying to make them laugh: “I stayed there making fun of people, and it didn’t really help, there’s some of them that are still mad at me ‘till today”.
“It was a huge-generalized chaos, because no one really understood what was going on”, she says, telling me that everyone gathered their things and went outside, trying to avoid more and more police repression. But, after the chaos, when they had to deal with the real consequences, they realized the size of the problem.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
“The festival still had five hours to go, there were a lot of people yet to get in, and then the financial part comes, which is a huge thing”, Bicuda’s founder tells me, “We had a loss of over R$390 thousand and I didn’t have that money - it took a while, but we paid everybody. That was really important, I learned a lot”.
Besides the financial impact, Victin points out, the hard part was understanding why the festival was invaded. According to him, the space where the event happened had signed a contract that allowed the party to go to 9AM, but, that was a lie, since the location only had permission till 4AM, which was never told to Bicuda’s production.
“The location deceived us, they told us that we had to pay for an exclusive permit, we paid for it, but never got the document. Today, we already have a legal procedure, because we need the reparations, right?”, says Victin.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
Fishing with tons of rods and nets
April 2024 was when Bicuda found itself entangled in a political fight that hurts the party’s existence to this day. The party, that built itself up on the importance of street events, and with the city hall’s support, was put into a media circus after an open event in a square, at Barão Geraldo, one of Campinas’ neighborhoods.
“We occupied a lot of different spaces in the city, until the Barão Geraldo event happened”, explains Victin, “It was perfect, wonderful, it was going super well, without any issues, until a memento during Katy da Voz e as Abusadas’ show, where they faked a blowjob on a dildo, and then a right-wing councilman was there and turned it into chaos”.
According to different tellings, the day of the event was going perfectly, there weren’t any complications. But, soon afterward, on social media, the party was being hugely criticized by people that never heard of Bicuda, just because they allowed the trio, three trans women, to perform.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
“It was their tour closing show, so we were really happy, thinking that that was just a step-up to another moment in their careers”, says Mabel, “But, it was chaos, it was literally the satanic panic that Campinas faces with this lack of understanding of culture”.
The criticisms didn’t stop at the party, though - the party was pulled into a political battle between Campinas’ conservative wing, commanded by the mayor Dário Saadi, and the councilwoman Paolla Miguel, the first black bisexual elected in the city. In between accusations of Miguel being the person behind Bicuda’s city hall support, the party released a post, explaining that the politician had nothing to do with the event.
“We know this is all part of a huge plot against Bicuda, against Katy da Voz e as Abusadas e also against Paolla”, Majestade Babilônia, one of the biggest names in the ballroom scene in Campinas, and also a Bicuda’s producer and DJ, points out.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
“We simply got there and did our performance, but, since people are evil, they used it to attack the councilwoman - and I found that really awful”, tells me Katy da Voz, vocalist of the trio targeted by the right-wing attack.
Owning up to the party’s “mistakes” when it comes to the performance, Majestade also tells me something that every person interviewed echoes: “Way more awful things happen in the streets of Barão Geraldo, in the streets of the outskirts of the city, in the streets of downtown and no one says a word. It’s us that makes them freak out”.
“We are party of these politics, it’s our bodies being discusses in those spaces”, Victin tells me, pointing out that Bicuda is a political party - their team even had to go testify in city hall. The fight ended up with the loss of the partnership between the city and the party, and also a sort of boycott against Bicuda, by a lot of locations in Campinas.
The party also was the reason for a new law that says that every event on the street has to have an age rating. About that, Victin says: “A mayor only signing a law about age ratings after something happened is absurd, why didn’t your government do that before?”.
Photography by Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko
Elusive fish
Unique in its ecosystem, Bicuda sees its resistance as a fundamental aspect of its existence. The party, that happens in a space dominated by conservatives and with limited opportunities, represents a free queer space and encourages free self-expression, one of the few spaces like that in the countryside of São Paulo.
“Bicuda has to keep existing and resisting, exactly in this place, because it has always offered a space for us and our trans bodies”, says Majestade Babiônia, about the party’s importance.
But, Campinas is still a harmful environment for Bicuda. On the last Halloween, the party, that was having a special edition inside Unicamp, Campinas’ biggest university, was invaded by the police again, that wanted to stop another Katy da Voz e as Abusadas show.
“We were already ready to go onstage, there was only like 10 minutes of waiting, and then we were told that we couldn’t go because police were there”, Katy tells me. The artist says that they only went onstage later to just sing and dance a little for the people that waited to see them.
Photography by Karol Fircelly
About what happened, Victin says: “We think that it was something internal, some politic must have reported it”. And that’s the environment where Bicuda has to continue their path of resistance, continuing to destroy these walls.
Celebrating six years, the party hugs the whole queer community in a territory where opportunities for this public are few and far in between. From giving space for trans artists, to offering a special moment for the ballroom scene, Bicuda is set on not giving up.
“We can never give into what society expects or wants of us, because if we do, we won’t exist - and Bicuda has to kepp on existing and resisting”, concludes Majestade.