Monika: Your transition became part of your artistic practice rather than something separate from it. Was that liberating, or did it sometimes make it difficult to have a private life away from your art?
Didirella: Once I started working with my uncle Ricardo's legacy, my private life became part of my artistic practice. I never imagined my work would be autobiographical. My autobiography became a spell, and whenever I touch it, I ask myself: what in my personal drama can conjure something good for the collective? What is mine that also belongs to everyone?
Monika: You have spoken about living between genders and resisting neat definitions. Do you think labels are useful to you, or do they mostly become cages?
Didirella: They are useful, yes. When I first launched myself, I used gender-neutral pronouns, as a non-binary trans person, and I received a lot of feedback that it was incomprehensible. I realised that, in some respects, I'd rather make life easier for the people around me. I don't want to keep correcting pronouns; I don't want to be the tiresome teacher. In my case, adopting an existing pronoun freed up time to focus on what I need, which matters more than correcting other people's speech.
Monika: You have also resisted the expectation that a trans artist should constantly educate the public about gender. What is the question about trans people that you are most tired of answering?
Didirella: “When did you start your transition?”
Monika: You have said that you do not want to make “woke” art with an instruction manual attached. What do you want an audience to feel when they encounter your work instead of simply understanding a message?
Didirella: That they find themselves in front of a kaleidoscope and can look at whichever little piece of mirror catches their eye. That there is no single Manichaean, dualistic message. That it is timeless. That at its core, as a secret intention, there is Love, ethics, compassion and kindness. That it seems more spontaneous and light-hearted than it really is, and in that way connects with younger generations. That they can touch it in such a way that it reverberates in their own kaleidoscope and multiplies their perception of life. That it carries the conversation into the body, into the pub, back home.
Monika: You speak about pleasure almost as a political necessity. Why is pleasure so important to you?
Didirella: As long as I take pleasure in living, I am uncontrollable and untameable. With pleasure in living, no opposing force can shake me, whether on the macro level, like a president or a political party, or on the micro level, like a programmer deciding to shut me out. We live in a world that is very badly medicated. Those who feel pleasure don't stop along the way, and they reach their mission at exactly the right time.
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| "As long as I take pleasure in living, I am uncontrollable and untameable." Photo: Rescue + Return Records. |
Monika: You have described beauty as something your art should give people, rather than something that needs to be justified intellectually. Why do you think beauty has become almost suspicious in contemporary art?
Didirella: We live in an era dominated by curators, programmers and artistic directors. In many of these cases (not all), the people in power either got there with a helping hand (rather than on merit) or are frustrated artists. It isn't easy being an artist, I understand that and I empathise. But at the same time, if you were a frustrated artist, you never experienced real art, and you start programming reparative, reductive art, woke in the worst sense, art that performs a social and educational service. Mind you: I think education is something greater than art, and that is precisely why I'm not prepared to take on the role of teacher on stage.
Monika: You also talk about an era in which artists and programmers seem increasingly preoccupied with safety and survival. How does this affect the art that reaches the public?
Didirella: It's an era in which artists care more about talking to programmers than about building an audience. An era in which programmers care more about keeping their jobs than about programming the new. An era of fear can reveal great artists; but an era of fearful programmers produces bureaucratic, agenda-driven art.
Monika: You also link this lack of artistic freedom to a society that seems increasingly disconnected from its own emotions. How does this influence contemporary art?
Didirella: There's another aspect: we are medicated with drugs that numb our emotions. These stabilisers affect artistic programming, because anything emotional becomes “over the top” for these people: their soul isn't snugly attached to their body; they are sad, full of fear of sadness. Art is on hold because art wants to deal with human sadness. And those in power, unfortunately, are going through a depressive phase.
Monika: You choose a different perfume for different projects. What does your perfume know about your art that an art critic might completely miss?
Didirella: Perfume imprints an identity onto the abstract and the sensory. I choose mine intuitively: either because someone suddenly gives me one and says “this is so you”, or because I search, through smell, for the essence of the character or the work. Perfume is a useless luxury object, and art is also useless in the concrete sense of utility; its “usefulness” operates on a subtler level. Art should be a democratic luxury “object”, for everyone, because we are all highly sophisticated, regardless of geography, social class, race or gender. Art is perfume. We are sophisticated beings, ALL of us, and that is why art that isn't afraid to go beyond reason stands the test of time. Wearing perfume means going somewhere very special. And being on stage is always something very special and should be honoured as such: the privilege of speaking to many people is part of my philosophy of life.
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| “I want to speak beyond the elite.” Photo: Rui Palma. |
Monika: You work across music, film, theatre, dance and visual art. If someone forced you to keep only one of those forms, which one would make you feel most deprived?
Didirella: Theatre. I want to speak beyond the elite.
Monika: You studied Lygia Clark and the relationship between the body and art. How has that early intellectual interest in the body changed now that your own body has become such an important part of your artistic language?
Didirella: I was studying Communication and dance, and for my final project I wanted to choose something that involved the body. The body is, quite literally, the house, and building a house that won't fall down is part of the human survival instinct. My great-grandfather was a bricklayer and laid the foundations of the house I'm in right now. Structure fascinates me; hence my obsession with the body. So that, further down the line, my ruins might hold up a better house. For a better future.
Monika: You moved from Brazil to London and eventually Lisbon. What did leaving Brazil allow you to become that might have been harder to become if you had stayed?
Didirella: My transition, all the way. The birth of Didirella. She was born out of the immigrant experience, a lonely one too, far from family, from privilege, from the place I came from. She was born in another world, the Old World. It's a bit like the myth of Tieta do Agreste: she returns to the land of her birth fully formed, her own woman.
Monika: Lisbon has been your base for years, but Brazil remains deeply present in your work. Do you feel more Brazilian when you are away from Brazil?
Didirella: I always feel Brazilian, wherever I am. I'm very Latin American.
Monika: In Cleópatra & António, you turn Shakespeare's Egypt and Rome into Brazil and Portugal. What happens when a European classic is forced to look at itself through a Brazilian trans-travesti body?
Didirella: It makes me nervous and rebellious, and it makes me study harder, dig through history and retell it through the lens of truth, without any supremacy. It makes me create a fair dialogue, in which I'm neither the exotic one nor the fetishised one, but an equal. Classical Europe is brilliant, and so is contemporary Latin America. I make this love affair happen and give both the same weight. And that makes people uncomfortable.
Monika: Your work often takes something traditionally considered prestigious, such as opera, Shakespeare or contemporary art, and puts it next to hyper-pop, sex, camp and fantasy. Do you enjoy making “serious” culture slightly uncomfortable?
Didirella: Yes! I have fun in everything I do, my team has fun and so does the audience. Rebellious pleasure is always the foundation. The verb “to play” sets you free. Want a healthy, happy time? Work with me! I'm demanding, but I truly mean well. There's no such thing as serious art: there's boring art and art that isn't boring. I've been a rebel since I was a child. It's my personality, something natural, animal: I'm feline.
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| "All the popular boys who bullied me confessed, after my transition, that they'd had a crush on me." |
Monika: You like putting things in dialogue that, at first glance, seem to have nothing in common. What do you find in this encounter between apparently incompatible worlds?
Didirella: I love bringing together things that, at first glance, wouldn't talk to each other: a musical conversation between my uncle Ricardo Wagner and the composer Richard Wagner is the basis of the opera WE AT THE NIGHTCLUB SUFFER TOGETHER. I love creating spaces of conversation for the impossible, for the magical, for those who declare themselves enemies. All the popular boys who bullied me confessed, after my transition, that they'd had a crush on me. What used to feel serious to me, and made me cry, feeling like rubbish, now makes me laugh as I watch these men grow old, ugly, flabby and boring.
Monika: And when you think about the art you consider “serious,” what are the elements that make you recognise yourself in it?
Didirella: Going back to the question… I love making “serious” art, like Wagner, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Shakespeare, because we start from the same places. According to Adélia Prado, the triad that drives creation is always the same: God, sex and death. It's the same for me.
Monika: A Gente na Boate Sofre Junto connects your uncle Ricardo Wagner Braga with the composer Richard Wagner. When did you realise that coincidence was too strange not to turn into art?
Didirella: It took me many years. I was on a residency in Maputo and thought: “There's something in this puzzle that doesn't fit.” A week later, I went on a residency in Paris and, at the height of a crisis, I started asking for help and called on my uncle, very tongue-in-cheek, the way he loved, in English: “Uncle Richard Wagner, help me!” That's when it clicked. I thought: it's an opera. It's about creating a fable-like, folkloric fiction, as the German composer Wagner did. Only this time, it would be a queer fable.
Monika: Your latest work imagines a future Brazil occupied by Europe, with a trans Brazilian Miss Universe hiding in a bunker beneath Copacabana. Where do these enormous, surreal images come from?
Didirella: From reality. South America is, once again, being occupied. Brazil is probably the last country still resisting.
Monika: If DIDIRELLA could walk into a nightclub, a church, a museum and a beauty pageant on the same night, where would she feel most at home?
Didirella: At the beauty pageant.
Monika: Finally, what's next for you? What dreams and goals are you working toward now?
Didirella: This year I'm releasing my first full-length album. It's been years of work, and I'm about to begin a phase in which music takes centre stage, both in real life and online. And I still have a grand finale planned for my uncle's legacy. After that, it will be kept safe in my heart.
Monika: Didirella, thank you so much for sharing your story with me and my readers.
Didirella: It was a huge pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.
END OF PART 2
All the photos: courtesy of Didirella.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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