This past July, I had the honor of attending and teaching at the very first major educational conference in Brazil, the three-day GEP 2017 Conference (Grupos de Estudios de Piercing). The GEP was started in São Paolo by body piercer Andre Fernandes, initially involving small seminars held on Sundays with one or two invited instructors. This year, Andre decided to try for something larger, not just to educate more people, but to bring Brazilian piercers together for the betterment of the Brazilian piercing industry.

The conference was held in conjunction with São Paolo’s largest tattoo convention, Tattoo Week, with the classroom overlooking the convention floor. This made it easier for attendance, since many had planned to be in São Paolo for the convention already, with many travelling 20 plus hours by bus from the opposite end of Brazil to be able to attend. It also made for an interesting time, as many of us had not seen a convention  as large as this. Some booths were even two stories tall, others with water features and marble floors! They even had a decent sized play area for children, with soft Nerf like material jungle gyms and trampolines. All of the above led to 127 piercers from all over Brazil (and a few surrounding South American countries) attending, an impressive number for a first time conference.

The conference’s speakers represented many different countries, with Jef Saunders, Ryan Oullette and I from the USA, former APP and LBP Board Member Danny Yerna from Mexico, Matias Tafel from Argentina, Gladix Porca Miseria from Spain, Jesus “Sala” Salaverria from Norway, and Javier Guerra from Colombia. Topics covered almost  every aspect of body piercing, from the Brazilian history of body piercing all the way to sterilization, and everything in between. Live translation was provided by the wonderful Emilia Aratanha from English to Portuguese, and by either Andre or Matias Tafel from Spanish to Portuguese. The Conference also had a small expo area, with vendors such as Industrial Strength, Dinamica, Namaste, Sacred Symbols, Kiwi Jewelry, Biometal, Kraken, and Painful Pleasures Brazil. The event came to a close with a lovely banquet dinner at a small private restaurant, and with a beautiful and immersive performance put on by La Negra, an Argentinian performance and suspension artist, and Thiago Soares, her Brazilian counterpart. Everyone attending left happy with the overall experience, and extremely appreciative to have access to so much knowledge from so many different piercers from around the world. With Portuguese being so different from Spanish, many Brazilian speaking piercers have a tough time absorbing and understanding classes in English at APP, and classes in Spanish at LBP. I can attest to this difficulty in language, as I attempted to learn as much Portuguese as I could in the months leading up to GEP, and I still found myself having a very hard time understanding Portuguese, and Spanish is my first language. This makes an event like this very important to piercers in Brazil. I can say that I personally felt a massively warm reception from everyone I interacted with during my time at GEP.

Andre and his small team (Tatiana Rodrigues, Emilia, and Thiago) did an amazing job organizing this conference. What they achieved in such a small amount of time left me flabbergasted. Muito obrigado a Andre e sua equipe de pessoas maravilhosas!