Memory
Antonina watching ships
Photos chronicle the decline of one of the country's largest ports in the first half of the 20th century
Df or two years, researcher Anabela Leandro spent time with residents of Antonina, a small municipality in Paraná located in an arm of the Atlantic, 80 kilometers from Curitiba, which is gradually disappearing. What she proposed was to try to understand the factors that caused the economic and cultural decline of the place that, in its heyday, housed the fourth largest and most important port in the country, Barão de Teffé. And the results of his studies culminated in the master's thesis Photographic images and memories: an incursion into the past of the city of Antonina – PR, presented to the Multimedia Department of the Institute of Arts (IA) at Unicamp, under the guidance of professor Etienne Samain .
According to the researcher, the objective of her work was to decipher how the local community lives today with the past and how it becomes present through memories and photographic images of the municipality. For this, 780 photographs were used (250 of her own and 530 old photos, belonging to the residents of the village), through which Anabela observes that the material shows different realities from Antonina: the old one, from the 20s and 30s of the last century, when the municipality experienced days of effervescence, ostentation and glory, in contrast to today, when the population – of 17 thousand inhabitants – lives with a high rate of poverty, unemployment problems and drug use .
For Anabela, the memories, ruins and beautiful photographs – in short, what remains of the past – highlight the contrast with the present. “I was able to observe that old photographs, provided by residents, are rarely found in the images produced today, including photos that I took myself. The older photos reveal another reality: the streets of the port, always so full of people, full of cars, even outside the festive season, in constant movement”. One of the main reasons that caused the city's decline was the closure of the port in 1970. “Probably caused by the dispute of political interests between the governments of Antonina and the neighboring city of Paranaguá”, highlights Anabela. The researcher also verified, with the residents with whom she made contact, that what prevailed in their memories and desires was precisely the glorious past of the city, which frequently hosted theater and music companies from all over the world. The city also had access to refined products, because all import and export demand passed through Antonina. For a small town from decades past, it was a fabulous movement for residents, both in cultural and economic terms.
This concept seems to summarize the opinion of Francisco Almeida, known as Chiquinho, an old resident of the village, when Anabela was looking at some old photographs with him: “... Antonina's future is the past...” Due to the tone of discouragement with which she pronounced these words, the researcher deduced that, what is usually related to the “future” of a city, “progress” had already been left behind, and this development could hardly be resumed. “The placement of Chiquinho also indicates another path – that the future of a city and its condition for permanence lie solely in preserving the memory of the village. As long as this memory is worked on in order to attract new investments in the field of tourism and, thus, alleviate the city's current crisis, be it economic or cultural”, says Anabela.
Six years ago, Antonina was a municipality where 6% of household heads had an income equivalent to two minimum wages, while 1.470 families were in absolute destitution. What's more: for every thousand children born alive, the municipality of Antonina recorded 45 deaths. One of the main reasons for the city's decline was, without a doubt, caused by the closure of the port of Barão de Teffé, which, considered the fourth largest in terms of exports in the country, was previously made up of private warehouses together with the Matarazzo family's factories and several other industries and warehouses. , contributed to the successful development of the city with the export of yerba mate.
The municipality also exported sugar cane, salt, rice, corn, beans, wood and many other products. And it imported products that it could not produce, such as shoes, fabrics, machines and perfumes. The port also had another particularity: it provided communication and transport to the main Brazilian cities and facilitated not only the arrival of products, but also news broadcast first in Antonina and only later in the state capital, Curitiba.
Today, governments and private institutions seek, albeit timidly, to invest in tourism. Practically attending to a few festivities, such as the festival of Nossa Senhora do Pilar, Carnival and the Winter Arts Festival, at the Federal University of Paraná, when the city receives a large flow of visitors. “But even so, the impression remains that the place remains frozen in time”, concludes the researcher.
