4 ideas
Stela's texts were never written by her. They were an unbroken spoken flow, called 'falatório', that someone else taped, transcribed, and broke into lines. The poem therefore exists in the gap between a voice and an editor, which makes authorship a collaboration the speaker never negotiated.
In lines like 'Eu era gases puros, ar, espaço vazio, tempo', Stela gives her origin as physics, not biography: gases, air, empty space, time. The asylum record defines her by diagnosis and history. Speaking of herself as elements moves her identity to a register the institution has no language to classify or correct.
'Não sou eu que gosto de nascer / Eles é que me botam para nascer todo dia' casts existence itself as something others impose. Under total custody, even the most basic fact of being alive feels authored by the caretakers, not the self.
Stela's words survive only because artists running an art atelier inside Colônia Juliano Moreira in the late 1980s happened to record her talking. Decades of her speech before that went unrecorded and are lost. Whether an institutionalized person's thought enters the record depends on the chance presence of someone with a recorder and the will to listen.