Check out the three inaugural texts of the Photography section in Jornal da Unicamp, curated by professor Fernando de Tacca
Margaret Mead, in a pioneering text, Visual Anthropology in the discipline of words [1], announced the importance of creating image banks to remember endangered peoples. Mead considered anthropology to be negligent until then for not appropriating imagery and affirmed the importance of recording cultural behaviors that are facing extinction so that they can be forms of rescue for future generations and allow us to understand the history of humanity and its potential. human. And at the end of the text, prophetically, a virtue of few, it warns of globalization and the implementation of a planetary communications system that will introduce a new repertoire for all members of all societies. At the same time, she warned about the presence of emerging imaging technologies and the day was not far away when the last isolated valley in the world would be receiving satellite images; we were just before the globalization of the Internet.
Mead ends his manifesto text by saying that many situations filmed or recorded visually cannot be repeated in laboratories, but visual and sound data collected, annotated and adequately preserved can be reproduced many times, when necessary, and can be carefully analyzed. She said that excellent optical instruments have taught us more about the cosmos, so quality recordings of these precious cultural materials can illuminate our growing knowledge and appreciation of humanity, such as the resurgence, I add.
However, she could not foresee that the image, beyond the memorialist, documentary issue and its existence in the archive, to be accessed in the future by researchers or descendants in search of identity, could be a carrier in itself of ethnic and identity affirmation by a process of existence through similarity: I am no longer what they want me to be; I can be you, my Indian neighbor; I was you, yesterday; I can be you today; I can be collective.
The constant loss of cultural values forged in the contact and acculturation of indigenous peoples, which sought first and foremost only a form of domination and subordination of these peoples, was so authoritarian and destructive that it did not allow ethnic traces to be left, such as language, customs and rituals. The lack of social place for these people marginalized by the State and ideologically fed by the dominant Christian religion, led these populations to move from their original place to another that their rulers wanted to perpetuate. The images of dances on the beaten floor are evoked by the magic dust raised by the dragging of hundreds of feet in their surroundings, like unique clouds of identity, built and recomposed from fragments of memory shattered by time. These clouds of dust carry the immateriality of the identity under construction, in a new place, a place never before predicted, and only visually alerted to us by the image production of Siloé Soares de Amorim [2].
Being open to understanding, or perceiving in the images, that resurgence can only occur in celebrations and ritualistic ceremonies, as well as in otherness and in the existence of certifying neighbors, goes beyond any bureaucracy or operational institutionality of the instruments of land and indigenous policy. The images also go beyond our historically constructed vision of sertão and sertanejo to locate new visual frontiers of existence. The images place us and bring us closer to this new place never imagined, and now fully experienced.
Images that do not move us and do not refer to shifts in our understanding and state of consciousness seem to have no place in the new order of visuality. The profusion of photographs in media oceans places them as part of distant galaxies, disconnected and without interaction, mute and nullified. This social hyperphotography functions nowadays as a cane, screen and stained glass window in front of a social event, as most people do, immersing themselves in the programmatic image. The images of Siloam, on the contrary, are the confirmation of the potency and power that the image can still have as a place of evocation of being, and in this case, of social being. The images of Siloam are disturbing because we rarely see this social condensation, from the experience of a gaseous social state to a liquid state that flows in cultural interrelations.
The new frontiers of visual anthropology are expanded by the relationship with art and its subjectivities, and beyond visual materialities, it opens up to the magic of a new possible and dreamed world. Existence by similarity is only a first place of existence, and the images no longer differentiate a mirroring, and in the resurgence they are all one and a concrete social being. Siloam's immersion in years and years of research allowed him to see the invisible, and show us the impossible, or the unpredictable. What we see, or what the images want us to see, is the social encounter in a process of friction in which they overflow with meanings: a new existence, like a rite of passage. A new birth in which the image as a document, as a witness, moves us even in times of loss of its aura of reality. What is put into action, on stage, is not the orchestrated event, but a concrete, heightened realization of the feelings of new beings, a true social fiction. The imagery of these intercultural processes created by Siloam's gaze is pactual and dialogical; it is close enough to transform eye and soul. We are transformed when we see the dust that rises in devotion pierced by the rays of light that settles again on the skin tanned by the sun and also on the suffering mother earth. They are immaterial links of the same magic of resurrection: image, soul and dust.
Fernando de Tacca, curator of the Photography section, is a full professor at Unicamp's Institute of Arts (IA) and editor of the magazine Studio (www.studium.iar.unicamp.br).
[1] First published in the book Principles of Visual Anthropology (Org. Paul Hockings, The Hague/Mouton: Chicago, pp.3-12, 1975.
[2] About the book: Amorim, Siloé Soares de. Indigenous resistance and resurgence in the Alto Sertão of Alagoas (Maceió: Iphan-AL, 2017).
Crossing the terreiro - opening of the promise Clenio
Kiupanká women
Toré Koiupanká Dec/ 2001
Queimada do Cansanção, Pankararu, Brejo dos Padres Tacaratu, PE
Queimada do Cansanção Pankararu
Preparation for the Katokinn party, Pariconha, 2002
Boy from Rancho Karuazu- Tanque, Pariconha
Klankó at Gregório’s terreiro, 1999, Água Branca, AL
Katokinn Beach, Pariconha, AL
Penitents during [Tumbalalá] Holy Week, Pambu, Abaré, Bahia
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