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Selected for the 13th Brazilian Graphic Design Biennial
Drag artists are a vital part of Belo Horizonte’s cultural fabric, especially within LGBTQIA+ movements. Many have shaped this scene for decades, creating a unique identity for the city’s drag culture. New artists continuously join, bringing diverse motivations and stories.
While the genre has grown exponentially in recent years, with national icons gaining prominence, there remains a lack of initiatives documenting the lived experiences and histories of local artists. This project addresses the absence of multi-platform visibility, documentation, and dissemination for Belo Horizonte’s drag community.
Create an interactive, transmedia documentary exploring Belo Horizonte’s transformist artists through design-driven storytelling. Experiment with diverse media to craft a narrative aligned with the project’s goals usign design methodologies.
Over three months, I conducted field and desk research to understand the target audience, gather visual references, and engage with the drag art scene.
80
artists mapped
6
events attended
5
interviews
As a result of the project, we have the production of a transmedia narrative composed of 5 online videos, integration with social media, posters of each of the artists, and the development of a web app with facial recognition to identify artists featured on the posters and redirect to the produced videos and social media. Through this development, it was possible to create a solution that could be accessed by different people in various environments where they can find the artists. This helped give visibility to the community and generate content that participants can use to promote their work.
The visual identity established for the project revolves around the idea that the participating drag artists create their own persona to perform. Often, this persona is very different from how the person is in their "real life." The project's name is a way to reinforce the importance of this sense of self affirmation and identity by putting the artist's name at a higher level of visual hierarchy and using the phrase "you can call me...". This phrase also serves as an encouragement for the people of the city to value the work of these artists by attending their performances and inviting them to do other jobs.
In a transmedia approach, it is important to establish a narrative across different media and maintain engagement with the target audience. For this, a user journey was planned with multiple entry and exit points in physical and virtual mediums, characteristic of a transmedia project.
As one form of promotion, posters of each drag queen were created. They feature the artist’s photo and name for easy identification and were displayed at parties in Belo Horizonte.
You Can Call Me is present on social media platforms and has a mobile web app that centralizes access to all content. This app includes a facial recognition feature: by pointing the device’s camera at one of the posters, the user is redirected to the corresponding drag queen’s page, which includes a summary video of their participation in the project, their social media links, and a link to the full documentary.
The experience is completed with a short documentary divided into 5 episodes covering different themes, telling the stories of the 5 interviewees, documenting various Belo Horizonte artists, and showcasing performances presented to the public during the project’s development.
You Can Call Me was screened on the Faixa de Cinema program (TV Rede Minas), at the 29th National Design Student Gathering, and at the UEMG CineClube. The project was selected for the catalog of the 13th Brazilian Graphic Design Biennial.
Software used:
