The following piece, an excerpt from Leo Felipe’s A Universal History of the Afterparty (A História Universal do After: nunc, São Paulo, 2019), newly translated by the author. It combines critical analysis, autoethnography, social theory, agony, ecstasy, and pure, unadulterated fun in its exploration of how underground electronica in Brazil forms communities half-way between utopia and hell. Foucault might have called these vibrant spaces at the margins heterotopias but inhabiting Felipe’s writing is more like imagining what (Black, Brown, queer, non-binary) heterotopias in the Global South might call Foucault. Felipe deals with the party as almost the inverse of the classic aesthetic object—it’s not the kind of art that requires disinterested observation. Critical distance simply destroys it. To encounter this kind of party truly—to encounter it at all—you have to be in it and of it. Call it critical proximity. Call it immanent critique. Call it a poetics of joy and risk. Call it a good time with a bad hangover.   

—The Editors

Kika’s Mamba

Goma traveled to São Paulo following Kika, who was booked to Mamba Negra’s fourth-anniversary party. Ana would perform at Odd the following Saturday. It seemed like a promising moment for the collective. I wrote to inquire about the 1203. Luckily, Luiz was abroad due to some residency, exhibition opening, or any other event from the art world that demanded his presence, and the apartment was available. With the globalization of consumption and customs, the Copan building had become a trendy habitat comparable to any other hotspot in global hipsterdom, with the great advantage of the post-retro aura the modernist building exuded. The hipsters exchanged glances of mutual recognition as they moved through the ramps and curving corridors, going up and down inside Block B’s elevators or standing at the counter of Café Floresta, between an espresso and a cheese bread. Wearing torn shorts and black socks pulled up over my calves, I, too, participated in this game of glances. I’m not sure if it was because of the designer architecture, but the building had a very positive effect on my sex life, which, in Porto Alegre, was so dead I referred to it as my sex death. Nevertheless, I suspected some dates were more interested in Niemeyer’s than me. Desire and power sometimes share the same infrastructure. Kika’s charisma—she is the Technocracy’s Prime Minister—also caused a caravan of crazies like us to travel from Belo Horizonte to catch her gig at Mamba. Goma had strengthened ties with the BH scene, especially with the 1010 collective during the Mikatreta festival, even importing some cast from the city, including one of the group’s DJs: Albin, the Scheherazade of Betim, who seduced Emperor Pinus with 1001 tracks. From where I stood, the city’s underground scene seemed to revolve around the Egídio twins and appeared queerer than Porto Alegre’s, whose main players were mostly heterosexual couples. The melancholy, distrust, seriousness, and abject prejudices of some Southerners are completely unfavorable to any worthy party scene. São Paulo was going through a repressive interlude after a government change. The authorities were trying to prohibit or cash in on parties by employing bureaucratic mechanisms. The semi-abandoned buildings in the city’s central area, with their industrial and decaying grayness, provided the perfect location for the total aesthetic experience of a techno party. Without the necessary permits, the fourth-anniversary party had to be held in a country music venue (black tarps were placed in some spots to minimize the aesthetic dissonance). To overcome the frustration and retaliate against the authorities, the organizers found a loophole in the municipal legislation and scheduled the departure of a party truck for Sunday afternoon. It would proceed as a procession-demonstration from Barra Funda to Largo São Francisco, ending the techno marathon with a grand finale featuring a concert by Teto Preto. The occasion demanded a proportionate amount of supplies. I couldn’t tell exactly how many drugs we took, but I know we spent a lot of money on cocaine, MDMA, ecstasy, and ketamine, including weed and alcohol on the shopping list. When Kika started playing, it felt like the world was collapsing. I was so high, that I couldn’t see anything except the LED tubes above the stage forming the shape of a heart—not an emoji heart, but a stylized apparatus in straight lines, crossed by veins and arteries pulsing with red and blue light. I took a deep breath and headed towards the DJ, trying not to trip over the dancers. Kika had bangs and a ponytail and wore a black t-shirt with the graffiti tag CRUZES, which her boyfriend BRF made for her. She looked like a little girl delicately tearing up the dancefloor with that abrasive music weighing tons of decibels. Ketamine’s effects had me positioned against the corner of the DJ booth, squeezed between it and the speaker column. Many factors influence where the dancing spot should be, starting with the ground’s level, grip, and the impact it offers (asphalt being the best surface for a dancefloor due to its high grip and low impact). However, I think the main factor is the Earth’s magnetic field’s influence on the human body. There must be some mechanism in the cerebral cortex that informs us of the correct position—like those Arctic foxes that dive into the snow knowing exactly where their prey is without relying on their five senses. I performed a constrained dance in that corner. When the music softened, I could hear one of the Egídio twins’ high-pitched voice screaming KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKAAAAAAAAAAAA! After the set, the crowd was overjoyed, and Kika seemed to have forgotten the world’s cruelties and injustices that so upset her. It didn’t last long. Tom had been detained in some sinister room by the country music venue’s security staff. Our friend’s skin color marked him as a target for violence. Other white people like me had used drugs on the dancefloor without facing any repression. We smoked some joints in the garden with the BH crew, all dressed in their best looks. Ana and I kept repeating kikasmambakikasmambakikasmamba over and over, very fast, until accidents started happening around us. Someone suggested we head back to the dancefloor to catch Cashu’s set. Valentina began her performance, and at that moment, I was transported out of time and space by the sight of a miracle. She was a shining entity that blinded the eye as if the air had been sprayed with gold. A sculpture made of flesh and movement, the technology of desire in its radiant glory. I stood before beauty. When the music stopped, there was no physical means to chase after the party truck. I suggested a rest stop at Copan before Teto Preto’s concert. Dani had liters of ketamine, and we all sank into a wide and deep hole. GB postponed his flight to Congonhas Airport until the last minute. The joke about missing flights had a recurring potency at our afterparties. Mônica joined the group, and before we left the apartment for the concert, someone suggested we snort more ketamine. This is typical druggie behavior, the equivalent of a drinker’s “one for the road.” The many hours on the dancefloor, the fasting, and the lack of sleep had drained almost all my strength. I dragged my carcass with my eyes closed, guided by Mônica, in low-energy mode. The anesthetic we inhaled in the apartment made the walk to Largo São Francisco even more challenging. What matters is that we managed to come back alive to Copan after the concert. I was determined that Valentina should come with us. She was handing out flyers from the party, which featured a reproduction of her fan with the word CUCETA written on it. She told us she had been living in São Paulo for only a few months, coming from Mandaguaçu, on the outskirts of Maringá (her first home in the metropolis had been Teo’s apartment). As a teenager, she had been part of a handball team and a marching band. She had done classical ballet and practiced urban dance until she fell into the epicenter of São Paulo’s techno scene, which caused a shift in her conception of performance. She was only nineteen. Besides her post-human beauty, she possessed a raw intelligence and a natural wit that often erupted in remarks that didn’t hide her hatred for the male, white, heterosexual, cisgender normativity that ruled the world she was forced to live in. Valentina was a real miracle. When I saw her remove her wig, revealing short-cropped hair close to her scalp, I thought it might not be a good idea to make any eye contact, fearing I might turn into a stone statue if our gazes met. The following week, Ana played at Odd for a small crowd. Due to a lack of permits (always the same problem), the authorities shut down the party, preventing the public from entering the venue. After Ana’s set, everyone who was inside was forced to leave. The sense of frustration was only overcome in August when we returned for the next edition of Mamba Negra. Ana ruled the dancefloor with a five (!) hour-long set. She got a thousand or so people dancing. The crowd roared in ecstasy at the start of the first track, one of those techno-batucada beats she liked to play, with the technical advantage of her CDJ 2000 setup, which outpowered the weak sound of the previous act’s controller. Pachamama showed her strength. No entourage accompanied the queen this time, so I positioned myself backstage near her, loyal as a dog. I danced for five uninterrupted hours, passing her drugs and drinks. Teo, Mônica, and Vini hung around for most of the time. Valentina made her miraculous appearance at the set’s peak, performing a sudden feline leap of two meters straight onto the stage—her agility and physical readiness were remarkable. The choreography she created could let her embody a multiple cast of characters in the same body: the robotic doll, the sensual assassin, the cornered animal, the mysterious creature, the beast in fury. These made-of-movement fantasies alternated and blended. Valentina’s disguises stirred emotions ranging from desire to disgust, with gestures and poses simultaneously sensual and violent, appealing and repelling, innocent and frightening. Kika had asked me to record videos of Ana’s performance, but the emotion was so overwhelming that I couldn’t manage it.

A Thousand Plateaus

The group had left sometime during the early evening hours. It was just Mônica, the plate of ketamine Dani had left, and me remaining in the apartment. I had met Mônica through Teo. She had a punk haircut. Rilke was her favorite writer (I suppose she read his letters as if the poet had originally addressed them to her). Before leaving Recife for the money jungle, a crooked friend had told her: go, Moni! go fuck and be weird. We sank into the soft couch facing each other, inhaling larger and larger amounts of the drug. Those were ideal conditions for hallucinations and delusions: physical exhaustion, fasting from anything that wasn’t a drug, vision impaired by dilated pupils, and the twilight that seemed to filter the air through the grains of a 16-millimeter film. And there was the influence of Copan’s infrastructure on the experience, because, after all, we were inside an architectural icon, inside a kind of artwork. Copan is a project of political ambitions (all architecture is political), an attempt to realize concretely the immaterial content of utopia. Fearlessly, I sank into the crater opened by ketamine in the hyperesthesia of a hallucinatory stupor. I slipped through a network of tubes branching into multiple vectors. I flowed through connectors, draining into the flow of data, gasoline, sperm, drugs, and shit. Suddenly, an abrupt cut interrupted the traffic, causing sudden detours, and lines of flight, and I descended further into successive negative plateaus. Perpendicular gears, either concave or convex, made the entire structure rotate internally at varying speeds. Mônica mentioned D&G, and I realized that once again, I was hallucinating Capitalism & Schizophrenia. I’m loving it. Long live the divine power of money, the inversion of all human and natural properties into their opposite. Long live the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. Long live capital in its reality, in its objective dissimulation. From this point on, as I became more anesthetized by ketamine, the intensity of the visions and sensations reached a superior degree. My delusional thoughts took on a mystical and religious character. I was taken to what seemed like an Afro-Brazilian religious goods store the size of a Walmart, where the saints and orishas were lined up as if mass-produced. Everything was bathed in white and gold. I encountered Goma at some after-party from the past or the future. Utopia is the place of norms. The concrete of the building opened above us, and a monolith, like the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey, slowly descended from the hole in the ceiling. As it got closer, I realized it was an iPhone. The screen lit up, displaying the mobile carrier’s logo, and Valentina emerged from the device in a flesh-and-blood hologram, dancing like a counter-update to Siri. I slid down an inflatable slide that deposited me into bed, and I quickly understood that the trip had finished. As a last vision, I saw a supermarket gondola full of junk food packages. I am capitalism’s little calf. I am its sacred cow. Mônica laughed. We woke up a few hours later. São Paulo was pulsing on a Monday afternoon. Pingo D’Ouro is made of 100% genetically modified corn and has an authentic artificial bacon flavor. The snack package Tom had bought blended with the bottles and dirty ashtrays left from the post-afterparty. I suggested to Mônica that we buy a copy of Anti-Oedipus I had seen in a bookstore store window at Largo São Bento. Slowly we walked in the rush of the city. I suffered from cramps in my abdomen, which had become so tight that it was stuck to my back. We had a green juice after I bought the book. Back at the apartment, I didn’t have the strength to read it.