Flashback: Farol da Barra

I arrived at the bar after Tracy did. He was fully engaged with my homeys when I arrived from the TVE –São Joaquim interview. My last night with Bia and Giovana seemed as fun and fresh as our first meeting months ago. We all met, Tracy too at the 24/7 seaside bar next to Barraca de Dinha in Rio Vermelho for cocktails and Acarajé. Boiled Peanut, roasted cashew and grilled cheese on a stick vendors happened by in addition to some panhandlers all looking for our Reals. Giovana bought a Pu-Pu platter of Abarrá and Acarajé to share.


Bia wanted to take us to an opening, of one of their dear friends. I cannot recall her name right now, but the show was engaging. Not what I expected and that’s a good thing. The gallery was inside the Colonial lighthouse of Porto da Barra. I had passed it many times, meandering through the neighborhood. Though I had never had had the desire to climb the stair and check into the nautical museum. After I had scoped out the show, which was a fascinating statement on waste, I went to find a toilet. The bathrooms shared the floor with the observation deck. The sentries needn’t have left their posts for long.


I was mesmerized nestled myself just inside one of the turrets. Time was elastic standing under a slit of a moon, with beachfront floods casting sterile, white shadows on surf & sand, as the flickering fistfuls of light beams splashed across the murky waves. I vacillated between centuries, free associating myself as a colonial sentry, a landscape oil-painter, a 21st century Coast Guardsman, tourist, dignitary or photographer. Pre-Edison I knew that the Portuguese or the Brazilians must have had mirrors and torches where we are so electric. I was all of them, all of those time periods for a flicker of time.


Returning to the gallery, I dug a bit deeper into the show. The artist had made a discipline of walking, swimming and diving along the coast, scavenging the detritus, forgotten and rejected by other people. She had packaged every piece of garbage in plastic with a label as if it a consumer good for sale in Wal-Mart or the local mall. Everything was plastic, brilliant primary colors, mangled or worn. She later said that everything here represented floaters. She dove for the things that sink, metal, glass, certain woods and furniture. The beach had always been an inspiration for her. Prior to this chapter she said that she had absorbed the landscape, the elements, birds, fish and sounds in a more traditional way. Now she reacted to it, in deference to responding to it.

Bia, Giovana more goodbyes

I was continuing the beginning of Goodbyes- Immediately with these two women I want to be laughing, and then I am, we all are. I have a buoyancy around them. Peanuts, acarajé, beer, coke and abarrá we littered the table and filled our bellies at dusk in Rio Vermelho, perto de Barraca da Dinha. This time too many itinerant snack sellers and beggars came looking for resources, a handout or a point of sale. The only thing missing was Paulo, another designer and Bia’s colleague. He couldn’t get a babysitter. We ended up leaving to see an opening of their friend, a former Sacatar fellow inside the Farol de Barra.


Their friend’s work was focused on the sea environment, garbage and recycling. She swam, dove and collected waste left behind. The dives yielded glass, wood and metal. Swimming and scavenging brought the plastic detritus that she had carefully packaged and labeled as if it were a consumer item for sale. The name of each item was the same {Dev} olvido do mar. Simply and effectively executed, the juxtaposition of saturated rainbow colors and consumerist packaging targeted our disposable culture and our lack of reverence for the sea ; a resource and home to Orixa.


Looking for a spot for xixi , I found the terrace or I guess cannon battery that overooked the corner of the Bay, (Baia do Todos Santos) and the Atlantic. The imposing Farol light pulsed red and white beams into the water and the four turrets, now chained must have been former lookout or sniper spots. I made some murky pictures in this inky night occasionally interrupted by floodlights highlighting the lighthouse as an icon.


Getting out of the Jeep at Eneida’s where we were crashing to say goodbye back in Rio V. wasn’t difficult, but it tugged at me. In that moment of transition these two women had made themselves available to Michele and me. Bia and Michele sketched dreams of future collaborations. We all quickly learned to have fun together, enjoying each other despite a lack of shared language.

Acho que sim; pode ser otimo!

Artist workshop-Escola Cultural Mario Gusmão, Amaralina-Sunday afternoon.

Ten days ago Hannah and her colleague, Rogerio, a Brasilian children’s book author gave a lecture to black high school in the Liberdade, (Freedom) neighborhood of Salvador. Augusto, Lauri and I accompanied them. Following the lecture Hannah and I took the onibus from Pelourinho to Amaralina. The bus route followed the Bay to the Farol de Barra, then continued along the Atlantic Ocean to Amaralina, just past Rio Vermelho, (Red River). We had a meeting with Raquel, one of the administrators at Escola Mario Gusmão to discuss a potential art and music workshop with the Sacatar fellows and her students.

The children, 7-14 years old live in the favelas cut into the hills above the school and the beach. Mirroring other programs that we have visited, local public school children often attend an Art and Culture satellite school to supplement their book learning. The curriculum includes theatre, music, art and dance. The children receive three and half hours of instruction twice a week, including snack-time. The program is divided into four sessions per day, each ninety minutes long. School begins at eight and finishes by five.

Befitting an underfunded program brimming with hope and good intentions, Raquel was pushing for a bigger commitment from us than was truly feasible. Her construct was that she would negotiate rooms in a hotel virtually adjacent to the school. We could have breakfast for free, but other meals and incidentals would come at our expense. Materials were sparse. She had hopes that they could receive a handout from Sacatar. And that Sacatar would cross reference the Hotel Villa Mar in their press materials...


After our meeting, I asked Hannah if we could just walk the beach for a bit before going back to Itaparica. We quickly shed our sandals after crossing the boulevard running between the school and the beach. Like children we ran into the shallows of the surf, soaking our legs and laughing. Up ahead we saw a ledge of rocks with a casual café set on top. We had hopes of punctuating the afternoon with Caipirinhas, and then hopping a bus to the Lancha.


The Café, turned out to be a military beachside resort. There was a pool, tennis courts and full restaurant for officers, their families and retired military personnel. Cut into the hill above the resort were rooms for the members. Enlisted men bunked in a large military base on the other side of the hill. We hadn’t previously correlated the base with the resort.


Unlike my perception of this happening on this scenario in America, we were offered cocktails instead of a quick armed escort to the front gate. I sussed out this curious environment over our drinks. The current crop of vacationers consisted mostly of small families with children all in need of a fat farm. Homer and Marge might have an honorary membership. The affable waiters, casually dressed were warm and quite endearing. They invited us back for lunch, but not dinner. We were the last to leave the bar at 6:15. The staring MP's whispered back and forth as we left through the front gate, looking to contextualize us I guess.


We arrived back at Sacatar a few hours later, still giddy from the surf, cocktails and that curious bar scene. Over dinner we discussed the reality of a four day workshop close to the end of our residency, with the other fellows. All of us work with children, in similar inner city public facilities, in private institutions or in both. We all had the altruism piece, but were humpin’ for time. We needed more information from the school and from Augusto, aka Sacatar. Before putting it to bed, we roughed out a loose concept of what it could be based on our expertise.