Tybyra e o Harlequin

Susan Thomson

Written and directed by the artist Susan Thomson, the short film Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022, 34 mins) premiered at the Cinemateca, MAM (Museum of Modern Art), Rio de Janeiro in December 2022. It was developed as part of an artist residency with Instituto MESA over the course of 2022 supported by the Plural Program of the British Council. The film features the performer Ombá Yîàrá, cinematography by (at the time) two students of art and cinema at Federal Fluminense University (Niterói, Brazil), respectively, Rai do Vale and Isabella Moriconi, and music by Billy Kenrick. The following combines excerpts from the film’s monologues and a reflection on the research and process.

Giving rhythmic testimony hidden, undetected,
living incommunicado,

We won the case
From a glass box
Ready to produce an heir

We won the case

In the courtroom I spoke in cracks and rhythms, in short bursts

From the back of my throat
I spoke of the distant primeval past
Of millions of years

And to come to this
Now
Species falling through my hands

Species falling through my hands

harlequin my large brown eyes, and a jester’s coat, the yellow flecks all over my body, my
bulbous eyes, here I am, like a classic fairytale, transformed

The Harlequin in the courtroom

Colored diamond outfit
A map of the world on my back

Trickster who disappeared

And returned

Like a Christian myth of resurrection

Crossed with a fairytale

My four fingers and short arm reaches out to you

Takes your hand
Asks you if this is really the way
My curled up leg

Bent back on itself
Ready to leap away
To safety
I don’t trust your protection

A tinge of green in my brown eyes, the coat of a wet leopard

The copper mine that would have destroyed me, halted

They encroach, encroach.

If a tree falls in the forest
And there is no-one there to witness it

Does it really fall?

A frog cannot change its spots

But it can fall through your hands

Into oblivion

Harlequin frog monologue, by Susan Thomson, from Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022, 34’)
translated into Portuguese, and voiced by Ombá Yîàrá.

According to legend, Italian saint Don Bosco in 1883 had a dream in which he described a futuristic city that roughly fitted Brasilia’s location. Is it the city of Kafka as Bruno Zevi says? The Foreign Ministry floats above the water, while the Justice Ministry hovers above the ground. Darwin, writing in The Voyage of the Beagle, carrying a chain of chronometrical measurements around the world, he travels around. His sense of pleasure in the Brazilian rainforest, the loud sounds of insects, and then silence. Luminous insects, life after death. The rings in one instance retain their luminous properties nearly twenty-four hours after the death of the insect. Memory is like gravity. You lose memory, you lose your existence.

Monologue, by Susan Thomson, from Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022, 34’)

Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022, 34’) is a dance docufiction which I wrote and directed during the British Council Plural Program artist residency with Instituto Mesa. The film is based on two stories told together in dance, poetry and documentary, featuring performance artist Ombá Yîàrá. There is the historical story of Tybyra, an indigenous gender non-conforming person, who in 1613 was tried and sentenced by French colonials in Brazil, and subsequently shot from a canon into the sea. And the story of the Harlequin, based on a court case in the Intag valley in Ecuador involving a harlequin longnose frog, thought to be extinct and then rediscovered thirty years later in 2016. Its special protected status as a result of perceived extinction led to its winning one stage of an ongoing court case, stopping a copper mine project from going ahead, although a final decision is now imminent in the case.¹

The film explores ideas of the Rights of Nature and ecocide law as well as questions of racism and colonialism and their effect on indigenous peoples and the Afro Brazilian diaspora through the historical control of bodies, in terms of labor, race, gender, and sexuality. As part of the residency, I researched the now extensive and growing solutions in law for the climate crisis, which will seek to criminalize the companies, individuals, and governments who pollute or destroy environments and people’s lives, the converse of the current situation where it is the climate activists who are the ones jailed or threatened, in the UK and Brazil, and indeed worldwide. During 2022, at the time of the residency, a Court of Appeal decision in London allowed a class action to go ahead in the UK against mining giant BHP, from over 200,000 individuals who were victims of the Mariana dam disaster in Brazil in 2015. This is one example of the law being used effectively. Legal solutions are growing exponentially and of particular interest to me was the attempt to bring in ‘ecocide’ as an international crime in the Rome Statute alongside genocide. A definition of ecocide has been drafted: “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

I speak in the film with long-time Greenpeace activist and ‘Stop Ecocide’ Head of the Americas, Maite Mompó, and she is hopeful that the crime of ecocide will be brought in internationally, and she believes that countries and businesses are already starting to make preparations for this, including some countries adopting these issues in their constitutions. Ecuador was one of the earliest examples of a country including Rights of Nature in its constitution in the world, changing its constitution in 2008, building on indigenous ideas of Pachamama (or Mother Earth) and the protection of nature. The ‘longnose harlequin frog’ court case tests those rights, and Mika Peck, lecturer at the University of Sussex, and founder of Ecoforensic CIC (based on a paraecologist model of research), was involved in the case as amicus curiae, giving evidence to the court about the unique and extensive biodiversity that would potentially be destroyed by the copper mine going ahead, in total 59 critically endangered or endangered species, which include pumas, brown-headed spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, armadillos, and orchids. At time of writing, we are still awaiting the verdict (E.N See footnote 1).

The harlequin frog, with its propensity for hiding for survival, seemed a potentially queer character to me and the Harlequin of the film’s title also refers to Picasso’s harlequins, jesters and misfits, LGBTQ+ people, as well as the Harlequin sailor character in The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, whose patchwork clothing seems to evoke the colonial carved-up map of Africa. Here, it is Diosmar Filho, another interviewee in the film, who is a map-maker and geographer, deconstructing the colonial implications of mapmaking, but using contemporary Google Earth technology do so, uses maps to describe the disproportionate impact of colonialism and racism on indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples, specifically black women, and their limited access in Brazil even to clean water and sanitation.

The historical story of Tybyra, which I first came across in the book Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities by Estevão Rafael Fernandes and Barbara M. Arisi (also one of my interviewees during the residency) further develops this narrative about colonialism, including the exploitation and control of sexuality. The contemporary echoes of the Tybyra story seems especially resonant given the violence directed towards trans and non-binary people, and performer Ombá Yîàrá moves choreographically in the film from portraying the story of Tybyra, to that of the harlequin frog, to blindfolded Justice, to a felled tree, to a hummingbird that can potentially save the day.

Reconnecting with nature/the self

A spiritual trip

Thinking of this encounter with nature as like a dream

Walk along the line of a branch

Dance with aggression
Shake

Go to the periphery
Go to the centre

Find some interesting looking trees

And some interesting looking logs, dead trees

Step on twigs and hear them

Smell the smoke of a fire, the different woods burning

Imagine you are seeing situations from your life that require resolution, imagine important
characters form your life appear

Thinking about roots

The roots of a live tree, the uprooted roots of felled tree

(Ideas for Dance, Susan Thomson, excerpt from my notes to cinematographers during the
creation of Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022, 34’))

Awards/Prêmios

Official Selection New Filmmakers, New York, 2023
Impact DOCS Awards 2025
https://impactdocsawards.com/awards-of-recognition-august-2025/
   – Award of Recognition: Documentary Short
   – Award of Recognition: Liberation/Social Justice/Protest
Best Shorts 2025
https://bestshorts.net/award-of-recognition-september-2025/
   • Award of Recognition: Experimental
   • Award of Recognition: Creativity / Originality
   • Award of Recognition: Nature / Environment / Wildlife

Links

IMDB
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt38119996/?ref_=nm_knf_t_3

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Susan Thomson is a writer, visual artist and filmmaker working across the formal boundaries of visual art, film and literature. Susan has recently directed The Swimming Diaries (2024) funded by an Arts Council of Ireland Reel Art film award. This is an experimental docufiction feature length film based on her memoir/artist’s book, which was previously exhibited at X Initiative, New York and Tate Modern, London, and was exhibited and sold for many years at Artbook@PS1 MoMA, New York. The Swimming Diaries film had its World premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2024. It has won several awards and was featured in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA, Living Canvas outdoor screening series. Susan created film for the concert Derek Jarman Modern Nature; The Prospect Cottage Diaries, at Barbican Centre, London in April 2025, directed by James Dacre and featuring Tilda Swinton, Jessie Buckley, Donna McKevitt, Simon Fischer Turner, Nils Wanderer, Ollie Alexander, Will Young.

She is also continuing to direct a series of award-winning films on British postcolonial LGBTQ+ issues, Ghost Empire, funded by an Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Project Award. A new film in the series Ghost Empire § Maurice-Chagos (2025) launched at Leeds Queer Film Festival in March 2025. The Ghost Empire films are represented by sales agent Utopia Films and are available to watch on leading educational platform ProQuest. In 2022 Susan was a British Council Plural artist in residence with Instituto Mesa writing and directing the film Tybyra and the Harlequin explores the Rights of Nature alongside LGBTQ+ rights, which premiered at the Cinemateca, Museum of Modern Art (MAM), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in December 2022 and was selected for New Filmmakers New York Experimental film festival in 2023. For more information: https://www.susanthomson.co.uk/p/about.html

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¹ E.N. In 2023, a Specialized Constitutional Court ruled a violation of Nature’s rights, revoking the environmental license and effectively halting the mega-mining project. However, reports have suggested that the Ecuadorian government may concede licenses to other companies heightening concerns. A critical issue remains: State must to enforce a complete mining ban in the area. For more information see Carlos Andres Gallegos-Riofrío et al “Frogs, coalitions, and mining: Transformative insights for planetary health and earth system law from Ecuador’s struggle to enforce Nature’s rights”, Earth System Governance, vol 24, April 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589811625000199 (Accessed July 2025)