Interior (Far-remote-interior)

(1996, photographs)

The bone-dry interior called Sertão, by and large situated in the Northeast of Brazil while invading the Central West and the Southeast regions, is the hidden country: a mythical area, vast and remote, poor and archaic and, paradoxically, immensely beautiful.

The small towns of the interior Brazilian Northeast are reminiscent of a paralyzed time, surrounded by the vast wilderness, under the heavy monotony of the constant sunlight, wonderfully recreated by Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa in his masterpiece “Grande Sertão: Veredas”.

The region is formed by numerous desolate areas, valleys, canyons, rocks, overall covered by a rough vegetation, most of the time dry due to the scarcity of rain and all of a sudden shiny green, during the rare blessed seasons. But the Sertão goes beyond all the aridity beneath the infinite blue sky. It has a metaphorical meaning.

The region symbolizes infertility, struggle, braveness and monotony. In the oeuvre of Guimarães Rosa, the Sertão is more than a geographic or a social reality:  “Sertão is everywhere. Sertão is the world.” In that sense, the man from the Sertão is not just a man living in an specific era and area, but the universal man, facing the eternal  dilemmas of the Humankind: good, evil, love, death, the existence or inexistence of God…

With this project I wanted, from a single viewpoint, to suggest a narrative dimension to a village in Sertão: an overall simple and clear view from the place and its allegorical significance. As a substitute for the calm and castigated rural landscape, its invisible presence in the portraits of its people and the facades of their modest houses.

“O sertão está em toda parte. O sertão é o mundo.” Guimarães Rosa (Grande Sertão: Veredas)

Work commissioned by the City Council of Macajuba, Bahia, in 1996.