Monica Zarattini reinterprets the War of Canudos and imaging technologies in light of contemporary conflicts
The project Plano, seco e pontiagudo, by photographer Monica Zarattini, addresses changes in photographic technologies and reflections on contemporary Brazil and its history.
It includes a book, made from images of two trips to the Bahia backlands, where the War of Canudos took place, and an exhibition. Featuring photographs measuring two to seven meters, the exhibition occupies the façades of several occupied buildings in central São Paulo and can be seen starting next Monday, the 18th. The full exhibition, including projections, opens on the 23rd at Ocupação 9 de Julho’s June festival.
Installation of the photographs on the façades begins on the 16th and, according to Monica, promises to be an event in itself, given the scale of the images.
The first trip for this project took place in 1989, when Monica worked at O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper and was sent to photograph a supplement commemorating the 80th anniversary of writer Euclides da Cunha’s death.
Euclides da Cunha covered the end of the bloody War of Canudos for O Estado de S. Paulo. An estimated 25,000 people died, 20,000 of them civilians. That reporting gave rise to one of the greatest works of Brazilian literature, Os Sertões, recently republished in a superb edition by Ubu Editora.
The second trip, in 2016, was already part of a personal artistic project in which she retraced the first journey, but used different photographic technologies, ranging from analog to digital and including expired infrared film.
The three imaging technologies used in the work — analog black-and-white from the first trip, digital color from 2016, and landscape photographs taken with expired infrared film — create an overlap of temporalities that places us within a web of continuities and transformations spanning not only the landscape but also life and everyday experience in Brazil over the past 30 years.
They also resonate with tensions that have resurfaced for more than a century, from access to infrastructure to land ownership. These intersections are the theme of her exhibition on the façades of occupied buildings in central São Paulo. (Some are shown in the album below and in the featured image.)
Plano, seco e pontiagudo does not draw a direct line of continuity between the War of Canudos and the social movements for housing to which Monica dedicates her book. But it creates parallels between these situations to set off a network of debates capable of mobilizing historical memories and desires for a different present at the same time.
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