Some material on this page, including images, also appears and is taken from Chapter 646 of the Orange Book of the Kristang people.
The Ultrapasiensa or Kristang gunslinger armour-aesthetic is a near-future or future aesthetic primarily associated with performance, leadership, individuation, Deep Time and challenge and trial in Kristang. It indexes how before we were called Kristang, we were called Casados, and served as the stalwart defenders and captains of the guard in the fortresses and defenses of Portuguese Melaka, and keepers of the peace in post-1703 Dutch Melaka. Ultrapasiensa also translates to Surpassability and is one of the names for the 64th dimension of spacetime in Kristang and in English translations of Kristang metaphysics.
Ultrapasiensa is imagined both as a contemporary aesthetic like Azuletra, and an indigenous and creole imagining of our future, blending both of these together and challenging ideas about what counts as tradition and what counts as invention.
Ultrapasiensa celebrates this original heritage and role we played and how it continues to be something we manifest today, while also incorporating and subverting our projection of Death as a cowboy, and creolising how we approach the concepts of vulnerability, weakness, strength and antifragility as these are represented and suggested by the symbol of armour.
In modern times, as a people we tend to display fierce, superhuman levels of resilience and independence, especially our leaders and Elders, and so the Ultrapasiensa aesthetic celebrates and honours this by combining elements of the two other primary aesthetic styles in Kristang of azuletra and gonsaleju while also indexing these additional unique elements that are not present in the other two, and making use of striking colour contrasts to underscore our ferocity, high level of impact despite being such a small community, strong connections to the solarpunk and spicepunk movements and ideas, especially as incorporated in the concept of New Sundaland, and strong present- and future-orientation.
The aesthetic is also strongly associated with queer male Kristang identity, dreamshining, and body positivity and neutrality, again often being used to subvert and/or creolise prejudices and stereotypes that others may have about the body, sexuality and attractiveness, and the respect and dignity that should be accorded to Creole-Indigenous people and our practices and ways of being.
Ultrapasiensa indexes a robust, hefty, thick and strong masculine queer identity that underscores how positively we treat healthy expressions of physical self-regard and attractiveness, and how much we recognise their core components and connection to Kristang culture.
