Memories, ruins and urban landscapes: creating narratives through audiovisual productions of Belém do Pará

Memórias, ruínas e paisagens citadinas: construção de narrativas através de produções audiovisuais de Belém do Pará

Abstract:

If peripheries are margins, here we call them edges, baixadas. Belém do Pará deals everyday with the dynamics of being urban and Amazonian, a metropolis woven by rivers that lead from tourist landscapes to its most populated neighbourhoods. Given the imaginaries established since colonial times about what it means to be and live in this region, audiovisual production today emerges as a tool to render these narratives more complex. The movement to move out from the geographic, economic and political centre of the city, a movement linked to the creativity that emerges from peripheral neighbourhoods such as those discussed here, Terra Firme and Jurunas, results in cultural productions that speak of themselves, its inhabitants and the city itself. Amid circumstances of survivals and social strategies, therefore, articulations and creations emerge that strengthen the knowledge and value the traditions of these and other neighbourhoods. As audiovisual narratives become woven, other narratives about the city are also constructed.

Keywords:
Urban Amazon; Audiovisual; Baixada; Narrative; Landscape

Resumo:

Se periferias são margens, aqui, chamamos de beiras, baixadas. Belém do Pará lida cotidianamente com as dinâmicas de ser urbana e amazônica, uma metrópole tecida por braços de rio que levam das paisagens turísticas aos seus bairros mais populosos. Diante dos imaginários estabelecidos (desde os tempos coloniais) sobre o que é ser e estar dessa/nessa região, hoje, a produção audiovisual desponta como ferramenta para a complexificação destas narrativas. O movimento de sair do centro (de poder, econômico e geográfico) da cidade ligado à criatividade que emerge de bairros periferizados como os aqui tratados, Terra Firme e Jurunas, resulta em produções culturais que falam de si, seus habitantes e dessa cidade. Assim, em meio a circunstâncias de (sobre)vivências e estratégias sociais, emergem articulações e criações que fortalecem os saberes e valorizam as tradições destes e nestes bairros. À medida em que narrativas audiovisuais são tecidas, são construídas, também, outras narrativas sobre a cidade.

Palavras-chave:
Amazônia urbana; audiovisual; baixada; narrativa; paisagem

INTRODUCTION

Belém do Pará, situated in Amazonia, northern Brazil. As a Belenense woman, born and raised in the city, I learnt about its history both at school and by overhearing the everyday stories, recollections and commentaries that circulate informally in its urban space. The lived experiences that escape the pages of History with a capital ‘H’ - the history that is institutionally established - are diverse, shaped by the perspectives of those who produced and reproduced these narratives and who also lived them. The timeline of the city, which in the golden era of the region’s rubber economy was hailed as a Petit Paris,¹ has been drawn largely to connect diverse kinds of colonial events taken to compose its ‘official History.’

Although some Amazonian municipalities are today perceived in terms of their urbanity, we can still observe the persistence and prominence given to colonialist achievements: the first streets and neighbourhoods to be occupied, the old townhouses that once belonged - and in some cases still belong - to the wealthiest families, the districts settled by rubber-boom elites and the subsequent ruins (Abreu 2012, Simmel 1998) of landscapes built and inhabited by these actors. What falls outside a given ‘centre,’ a term whose use will be discussed later, thus remains on the margins of the stories that are told - or at least the most widely known.

I begin this article by speaking of both universal and local debates since, from the outset, I wish to explain my decision to select and discuss specific framings: here I prioritise speaking from the non-centre, from places that are not touristic, and through non-hegemonic discourses. To this end, I chose audiovisual work as a mode of artistic - but also social - expression that, alongside other art forms, has become an important tool in the baixadas (lowland areas) of Belém, serving as a means of recording narratives, telling their own stories and revisiting collective memories, as Gilberto Velho suggests:

The organisation of experience takes place through processes of interaction that depend on frames and cognitive-affective bases. I also consider these to approximate Clifford Geertz’s notion of a web of meanings, itself explicitly influenced by Schutz (Geertz 1973). Actions and forms of conduct are continually subject to interpretation by different social actors, proceeding from a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. (Velho 2008: 147)

In the following pages, therefore, I reflect on audiovisual productions related to two neighbourhoods of Belém - Jurunas and Terra Firme - seeking to discuss the paths through which peripheralized communities and spaces have sought to evoke and record the memories of their ancestors, as well as the everyday practices of these landscapes that configure and reconfigure imaginaries of the city over time and through creative expression. In conclusion, I intend to combine the notions of fiction and the imaginary, understanding both to be constituted through acts of selection and perspective on the part of those who produce them, but also as a means of highlighting the nuances that emerge in locally produced work - work generated ‘from within’ these localities and/or social groups.

EXPERIENCES OF THE CITY: FOCUSING ON JURUNAS AND TERRA FIRME

Belém, located in the northeastern region of the Brazilian state of Pará, was founded at the confluence of fresh water rivers, bordered by the Guamá and Guajará Bay. The oldest neighbourhoods - originally occupied by non-indigenous colonisers, predominantly Portuguese - today make up the city’s historic centre, which is also where the local legislative and judicial powers are concentrated. Across a somewhat broader zone lies the economic centre, encompassing this older core along with other neighbourhoods later occupied by local elites several centuries after its foundation, extending into the ‘golden era’ of rubber extraction, which was another event that marked boundaries within the city through the exploitation of labour and distinct modes of dwelling.

In this way, people arriving from other states in search of work - especially from Brazil’s northeast, as well as from the islands near to the Pará capital - came to settle in the city’s low-lying areas or baixadas.² Specific districts were formed by this influx of workers and migrants, living in precarious sanitary and economic conditions, impacting their quality of life. These characteristics have been perpetuated more or less into the present day, reinforcing many of the stereotypes associated with these spaces.

I consider the space constituted by the baixadas as a symbolic border, therefore, since, beyond their geographical formation, they also possess a social composition. It is at the border that frictions and exchanges occur within a context of liminality (Turner 1974). Although these neighbourhoods may be physically adjacent to more affluent ones, symbolically there are cultural movements that pulse through the baixadas, imbuing them with a specific character. Centre-periphery relations are thus also mobile: while the concept of a geographical, political or economic centre remains fixed, the symbolic centre shifts, making it possible for each neighbourhood to be/have its own centre, creating a decentralisation or recentralisation. ‘Making the periphery the centre,’ as cinematographer Suane Barreirinhas remarked in an interview, forms part of the intentionality behind the creation of cultural collectives and groups.

Jurunas and Terra Firme, two of the most populous neighbourhoods in the capital of Pará, are located in low-lying areas whose forms of sociability with - and within - the city differ from the neighbourhoods regarded as middle- and upper-class. Interactions between neighbours, street events and collective initiatives and struggles are all elements shaping the everyday life of these districts, where senses of belonging are expressed in a variety of ways by their residents.

Although the Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI) data released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) were not made available in the 2022 census, the most recent figures - dating from 2010 - stood at 0.746. The map below, generated using data from the same period, indicates areas where subnormal agglomerations are concentrated, coinciding with Belém’s low-lying neighbourhoods:

Figure 1
Belém - Intensity of Subnormal Aglommerations or favelas in neighborhoods in 2010. Source: IBGE (2010) / Elaborated by Luiz Henrique Almeida Gusmão. Available at: http://geocartografiadigital.blogspot.com/2016/12/exposicao-de-mapasartigos-importantes.html.

Seeking to enter the universe of audiovisual production in these neighbourhoods, I looked for collectives and producers who have created work in image and sound, aiming to comprehend not only their creative processes but also their relationships with - and lived experiences within - the districts where they live and practise. During field visits and in conversations with direct interlocutors, as well as in more informal exchanges within these neighbourhoods, references are frequent to elders, the stories told about particular streets or significant events that persist through oral narration. In this way, expressions of belonging emerge concerning ethnicities, foundational myths (relating to the neighbourhoods and Belém itself) that reveal the internal dimension of stereotypes (re)recognised by the city as a whole. It is common to encounter narratives about these districts on television news programs and social media, which ‘freeze’ them around images of poverty, violence and ‘lacks’ (of opportunities, money, a certain ‘harmony’), thereby homogenising these localities. This finds a counterpoint in productions originating from within the neighbourhoods themselves. The dispute over narrative unfolds in the artistic sphere, grounded in political issues but also in their own histories and experiences, told now from the ‘inside.’

I consider reflecting through the sensible to be inherent to the process of exploring the landscapes and imaginaries that flow into memory. Pierre Sansot (1983) approaches landscapes from the perspective of sensibility, positing a heightened proximity between bodies and landscapes, touching on belonging, social identity and collective memory, while also setting out from multiplicity - landscapes in the plural - in order to comprehend the diverse perceptions of the city. For the author:

The landscape is what does not need to be made explicit or visible because we all live it together and, when we speak of it, we do so in a mode of implication or with an accent and a hint of complicity that escapes the outsider and marks them as such, even if they possesses a good biological knowledge of the environment in question. (Sansot 1983: 66)³

Still with regard to landscape, I also channel my reflection through Flávio Silveira’s proposal:

Landscape is a phenomenon of being because it is bound to the subject who dreams, perceives and represents. By allowing repose and an immersion in the interior of things, the elements that compose the landscape and that encompass its meanings, the subject becomes capable of organising it into a totality that is his or her own representation. Landscape exists as such because its vibrant force lies in the imaginary as a complex set of images upon which all symbolisation rests. This pluralism of images thus preserves the capacity to create subtle forms in which myth and poetry become possible. (Silveira 2009: 77)

As I drew closer to audiovisual producers (groups and professionals), I perceived the dimension of their practice that, very often, is driven by the absence of prior opportunities and, above all, possibilities of representation. Joyce Cursino,⁴ one of the interlocutors in this research, stated:

I would always go with my mum and dad - and especially with my grandmother, because we have a… my grandmother comes from a quilombola family there in Maracujá, my father’s mother - and we would always cross the Açaí Port to get to Maracujá Island. So my childhood was that Açaí Port. And when I grew up, people would always talk about the Açaí market, which is this one here in the centre, and they never talk about the Jurunas Complex, the Açaí Port in Jurunas… (Joyce Cursino, interview with the author, 8 November 2021)

Joyce’s references to the landscapes of Belém are rooted in her childhood and her family experiences in Jurunas. The absence of representations of these spaces - and of people like those living in her neighbourhood - motivated her as a journalist to choose her path through the universe of audiovisual production: films that could reach her community and in which her neighbours would be able to see themselves on screen.

AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION, CITY AND IMAGINARY

Audiovisual media form part of the artistic expressions that have come to represent the everyday life, cultural dynamics and personalities of Jurunas and Terra Firme. For this reason, I examine the audiovisual productions of groups, collectives and production companies as a way of thinking about the city constructed within these neighbourhoods through the landscapes they create and display, as well as how these narratives shape the contemporary imaginary of a region historically not perceived in terms of its urbanity. Understanding videos as archives that narrate and fictionalise the city of Belém, I present a selection of audiovisual works produced in these districts, relating them to the points that emerge in the interlocutors’ dialogues. In so doing, I allow them to elaborate what this city - and these images - mean for them.

Today, the videos produced by the collectives I observed seek out memories, as well as (re)creating narratives and organising their perspectives around the history and everyday life of the neighbourhoods in which they live, reinforcing senses of belonging and singularities that emerge in the formation of their territoriality, while also configuring an imaginary of these places. These are productions that express a strong sense of familiarity and, consequently, involve longer periods of information and data gathering, as well as extended conversations with residents - an unhurried pace demanded precisely by the proximity between the themes themselves.

Cultural production comes to life through popular artistic expressions. In peripheralized neighbourhoods, the street becomes a site of creativity because it is frequently a site of collective action: from festivities that close off the streets - like the aparelhagem sound-system parties, religious celebrations and rehearsals for quadrilhas juninas⁵ - to political mobilisations, commerce and, finally, the arts.

This text derives from research conducted primarily with Cine Clube TF, Negritar Filmes e Produções and Telas em Movimento, focusing on the neighbourhoods of Jurunas and Terra Firme. What follows includes examples not only from these groups but also from other productions that have also contributed to shaping images of these urban districts. Cine Clube TF - founded by Lília Melo, a Portuguese-language teacher at the Brigadeiro Fontenelle State Primary and Secondary School, located in Terra Firme - emerged in the aftermath of a massacre that took place in several neighbourhoods of Belém in 2014, in which many of the victims were known to the teacher or were family relatives of her students. Aiming to keep young people and adolescents as distant as possible from the risks and violence to which they are exposed, she sought to steer them towards art and social engagement. The teacher thus initiated a number of actions that later, in 2018, became consolidated as Cine Clube TF, which she continues to coordinate today. The collective is organised into Working Groups (WGs), each directed towards a specific artistic practice: PoAme-se (focused on writing and recitation), PeriferArt (visual arts), Perifa Incena (theatre), Perifsons (singing and music), Cine Dance (dance) and Petricor (photographic and video documentation, which captures images of all the WGs and projects developed by the collective).

The group frequently operates with an idea of ‘periphery,’ which I observed during fieldwork in order to understand how they mobilise the concept in their work, what they understand by the term and what it enables them to feel as a peripheral collective. I noted that it functions as a kind of ‘bridging term,’ linking their lived experiences to the notion of being ‘marginal’ areas found in other metropolises, though here it is configured in different ways via distinct geographies and contexts.

The creations and activities of the collective are mostly carried out in Terra Firme, as in the short films Cine Dance: the pulse of the Black body,⁶PoAme-se: love, freedom and black poetry⁷ and Love Smells of Pepper and Cumin,⁸ released in the second half of 2021. The teacher stated that youth living in the periphery have the potential to be a subject of art: ‘art gives you the means to communicate who you are, and you communicate that in school, the family and society. If you are in a collective that is essentially about this, you begin to create the strength to look up and embrace what makes you feel well. And defend what you believe in.’ (Lília Melo, interview with the author, 22 October 2021).

Joyce Cursino, also an interlocutor in this research, is a journalist, actress, audiovisual filmmaker and the creator of Negritar Filmes e Produções, a company formed by Black professionals, as well as the founder of Telas em Movimento,⁹ a project born from the joint collaboration of various production companies and collectives with the aim of ‘democratising access to cinema,’ as Joyce herself puts it. Whether through her production company or through this project, these professionals have extended this process of democratisation across multiple fronts: offering audiovisual production courses to young people, encouraging storytelling rooted in their own neighbourhoods, involving these youths in all stages of the process, including post-production, and subsequently making these works accessible to the community by organising open screenings in which neighbours can enjoy moments of culture and leisure, as well as exchange reflections on the themes addressed in the films. Joyce says that:

(...) the aim of Telas em Movimento is to democratise access to cinema in the peripheries, right, and now we’re already expanding to traditional communities in the Amazon too. Very much from the perspective of… of this very lack, this dynamic of the audiovisual production chain that is highly exclusionary. So, you have a course that’s hard to get into and also very recent in the city. Also, you have the lack of short courses in scriptwriting, in photography - this has only started to appear very recently, but in 2019 this landscape was still scarce. And we also have this colonisation of the narrative, right, which is always an outside perspective about our knowledge and our territories. (Joyce Cursino, interview with the author, 8 November 2021)

In this way, audiovisual production emerges not primarily as an artistic endeavour, but as a way of recording narratives that are not widely known, presenting neighbourhood personalities who hold significance for their communities, and addressing issues lived everyday on a particular street or in a specific district - factors that shape the experience of these urban spaces. In my view, these practices capture the present while also tracing the marks left by what has formed and continues to form these localities, foregrounding other community practices beyond those associated with violence and poverty - stigmas that imprison these spaces.

I argue that the city transforms people at the same time as, processually, they transform urban landscapes, Coexistence with - and within - ruins forms part of everyday entanglements. While the emphasis of these works is generally on people or situations deemed important to record, the past becomes present through the fragments that compose streets, neighbourhoods and frequently taken paths. This leads me to reflect on the ordinary, what belongs to the order of the common and endures through time (Eckert and Rocha 2013). For Benjamin, this is the presentification of the living in the dead (Abreu 2012: 32), a connection that, in the case of urban landscapes, for me approaches what has been termed an ethnography of duration:

The description of the city, which we are and which is in us, is a narrative transformed through the play of memory of its inhabitants as much as through the memory of the ethnographer, who reinterprets the interpretations of the inhabitants whose trajectories that he or she researches. (...) in the presence of the inhabitant who agrees to share his or her interpretations, the time lived in the city becomes the object of narratives that operate the forms of thought, ordering the discontinuities of ordinary rhythms. (...) The city dweller, motivated to evoke memories and images in the flow of biographical narration, reinvents him- or herself as a subject who narrates event-situations (Sahlins 1985) drawn from lived experience as a weave in the construction of meanings of a ‘self’ - narratives that are not devoid of normative, evaluative, prescriptive and ethical dimensions (Ricoeur 1991). (Eckert and Rocha 2013: 130-131)

Thus, the montage of images (and imaginaries) in audiovisual works undeniably elicits interpretations that fictionalise everyday life in accordance with the elaboration of narratives that make sense from particular perspective(s). What follows are a few examples of short films, presented through some screenshots in order to discuss these creations that rework images of the neighbourhoods and, consequently, of the city itself.

Gaby Amarantos, a singer of tecnobrega born in the Jurunas neighbourhood, has, since 2012, when she first gained national recognition, consistently highlighted her origins and her ‘pride in being from Jurunas.’ In June 2019, during the arraial festival of Coração Jurunense (a carnival and cultural association in the neighbourhood), Gaby Amarantos staged GabyChella,¹⁰ a show alluding to the Coachella Festival. Echoing Live in Jurunas,¹¹ the show she performed in 2012 in the doorway of her family home - where she herself lived for many years - GabyChella also featured a rooftop terrace as its stage, from which the singer and her guests performed. Both videos have a certain documentary quality, interweaving scenes of neighbourhood residents engaged in everyday activities with moments from the shows, producing counterpoints between possible experiences within these urban spaces and the ways in which these are inhabited in the city’s low-lying districts. (Figure 2)

Figure 2
Screenshots from Live In Jurunas. Source: Gaby Amarantos - Live in Jurunas - Show Completo (2011) video. Available at https://youtu.be/xZurp_HAcP4?si=88ua_8TeAtNTgYGS.

Some of the singer’s accounts and commentaries are also incorporated into both these audiovisual works, in which she gives her opinions about the neighbourhood as someone who affirms her sense of belonging and her ‘pride’ in being from that place, while also highlighting the characteristics of its residents, their verbal expressions and ‘Jurunense’ customs in general. In the second film, she states: ‘What’s the name of your city? Jurunas? Jurunas is a neighbourhood but it could be a city too.’ (Figure 3)

Figure 3
Screenshots from GabyChella. Source: GabyChella video. Available at https://youtu.be/LLCKtvOSlRc.

The organisation of peripheralized neighbourhoods allows them a certain degree of autonomy in relation to other areas of the city, especially those considered to be ‘central,’ as discussed earlier. In this sense, we can observe how the inhabitants of these districts, who have been weaving these narratives, elicit an internal perspective as their principal characteristic, emphasising that they calibrate their adherence to external narratives - whether originating outside the neighbourhood or even outside the country - while remaining prepared to construct their own archives and histories, irrespective of the heterogeneity of the materials involved:

We thus frequently find ourselves faced with an immense and rhizomatic archive of heterogeneous images difficult to master, organise or fully understand, precisely because its labyrinth is composed as much of intervals and gaps as of observable things. To attempt an archaeology is always to risk placing, side by side, traces of surviving things that are necessarily heterogeneous and anachronic, since they come from separate places and from times disjoined by lacunae. This risk is called imagination and montage. (Didi-Huberman 2012: 211-212)

In relation to montage - beyond the organisation of shots and scenes, or even archives, into a narratively coherent order - I believe, like Didi-Huberman, that the very disposition of elements composes the stories to be told. In this sense, components emerge that form part of the process of producing an audiovisual work, but also those that are so intrinsic to everyday experience that they permeate these creations, such as ‘unconscious memory, which lends itself less to being recounted than to having its symptoms interpreted - the kind of memory whose depth and overdetermination only montage could evoke’ (2012: 212), as the author writes.

One of the short films produced through workshops organised by Telas em Movimento was Limoeiro,¹² which focuses on Limoeiro Street in the Jurunas neighbourhood. The film brings together scenes of everyday street activities with the voices of residents who have lived there for many years, reflecting on the past and present in light of the neglect of municipal governance. (Figure 4)

Figure 4
Screenshot of the short film Limoeiro - Mostra Amazônia em Telas. Source: short film Limoeiro. Available at https://youtu.be/7ldD4nALlMs?si=vzGSCMytzKja6HL1.

I view the relationship with water as an allegory, which Elane Abreu describes as ‘incomplete, fragmented, dialectical, open to significations, since “ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings are the fundamental traits of allegory. Allegory, like the Baroque, takes pride in its wealth of significations”’ (Abreu 2012: 30).

In other words, the interest lies in retrieving the past of the work as it reverberates in subsequent presents, not in interpreting a past confined to its original artistic period. To critique is to apprehend the past of the work in dialogue with the critic’s own present and, within this dialogue, to perceive the ‘face’ of an epoch that the author renders present. (Abreu 2012: 35)

Landscapes shaped by channelled rivers, narrow streets, wider streets (whether paved or not), stilt houses and the intense circulation of people on foot or bicycle allow us to glimpse different layers of time within this composition. Citing Simmel (1998: 03), I see the ruins of streets and houses as this ‘product of nature,’ ironically or not, in a region that deals daily with fauna and flora in negotiations that are not always harmonious. Here I emphasise the specificities of these ruins in which humidity acts on the structures of houses, time becomes inscribed in the wood, while plants avoid asphalt and concrete in order to grow. Meanwhile, the layers of time - of cement and paint upon walls - render more complex the duration that constructs the city between the enduring and the forgotten.

Like Benjamin in The Arcades Project, I believe there is an effort to find ‘ignored objects,’ the everyday life of the city, those elements that compose the ordinary, so that they may become central to these audiovisual narratives, echoing the author who, in the city’s ‘detritus’:

resignifies them, transforms them into the material of his knowledge, causing them to contain another history that the society of the time did not tell us. In the collection, a new ‘totality’ is assembled whose fragments, introduced into a new context, free themselves from their original function. A new ‘face’ of an epoch is thus revealed to us. (Abreu 2012: 37)

‘Unconscious traces’ are also present, those elements not easily perceptible, that are not signs, that are not explicit: ‘Ruins challenge the spatiotemporal dimension with the chaos of memories (what has been, still is and has not yet been). They are vestiges of the past on the skin of the dead, their possibilities not yet consummated’ (Abreu 2012: 37).

Jeanne Gagnebin observes that ‘Benjamin’s critical historiography searches for the traces left by those absent from official history, in defiance of prevailing historiography’ (2012: 33). For me, this Benjaminian form of historiography resembles the objective of the production companies and collectives that recount the histories of their own territories - stories that have not been told or are often concealed by ‘official’ historiography.

While, in the spoken passages of the videos, there slip through ‘details that seem random, that could and perhaps should be discarded’ (Gagnebin 2012), the decision to let them remain as part of the final product likewise becomes a possible space of ruin, the past in some sense made present. ‘True remembering, rememoration, saves the past because it not only preserves it but also assigns it a precise place of burial in the ground of the present, enabling mourning and the continuation of life’ (Gagnebin 2012: 35).

Does our difficulty in orienting ourselves not arise from the fact that a single image is capable, precisely, from the outset, of uniting all [these bifurcations] and must be understood simultaneously as document and dream object, as work and object of passage, as monument and object of montage, as non-knowledge and object of science? (Didi-Huberman 2012: 209)

Montage - or even the initial assembling of images - is capable of awakening a series of effects, given the lacunary nature of the archive and even the threat of forgetting, as Didi-Huberman (2012) suggests. Henri Bergson (1999), in turn, emphasises that forgetting is essential to remembering and to memory itself. Insofar as the continuing life of a memory prolongs the past into the present, duration emerges as the phenomenon of the coexistence of times.

After moving away from Jurunas, Joyce initially reported a certain fear of distancing herself from the neighbourhood, but she stated that

afterwards I came to understand that Jurunas isn’t going to leave me and, above all, not the audiovisual works because of all this history we’ve been talking about here. So, the place is not only a physical space, right; belonging to a place is not only about a physical space, but about a space of memories. Wherever I go, Jurunas will be there. Wherever I arrive, I will be jurunense. So… the people who hire me will be hiring someone from Jurunas, someone who has a memory, a life, a childhood in this place of many contradictions, right? (Joyce Cursino, interview with the author, 19 August 2023, author’s emphasis)

The neighbourhood is perpetuated in the histories of these people, just as these people also reverberate through the neighbourhoods - through their actions, their presence and various other factors. Still with regard to this aspect of constructing and being constructed by the city, Cine Clube TF has produced several works with residents of Terra Firme in which they speak about their histories and their relationships with the neighbourhood. I highlight some of these statements in the screenshots that follow:

Figure 5
Screenshots of videos by Cine Clube TF. Source: Cine Clube TF YouTube channel. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cineclubtf667. Clockwise from top left: 1. Klebson Wylliams, coordinator: ‘I live in Terrra Firme, I’m known here in my community as KW.’ 2. ‘to go shopping and not have a price to pay.’ 3. ‘Here there is life, life with so much colour, we use our art to hide the pain.’ 4. ‘The Street has come to speak.’

People relate to the neighbourhood’s streets as an extension of their homes, a familiarity that spills over into the public and collective domains precisely because these are mutually interwoven. In this way, memories also become entangled: past, present and future overlap and operate in conjunction.

‘the past needs to be better understood since the present was already nestled within it. Here lies the astuteness of its activity: to attend to the existence of the present in the past. This task is directly linked to resurrection’ (…) It is the double examination of the work: both as a social phenomenon and as a monad. This implies ‘deciphering the fleeting pact’ between the contradictory forces of the work (past and present) in order to capture and actualise these forces as if in a dream. (Abreu 2012: 35-36)

In 2021, the Tela Firme Collective produced the video series Nós na Tela (Us on Screen), composed of four episodes released on the organisation’s social media platforms, featuring ‘figures who recount and build the history of this neighbourhood’ according to the collective’s own webpage - incouding people like Zé da Pracinha, Dona Zuleide, Seu Manoel da Vera Cruz and Dona Regina. Through the narration of these prominent residents, the film interweaves images of the neighbourhood, its people and their routine activities.

Figure 6
Screenshot of the first episode from the series Nós na Tela by the Tela Firme Collective. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPbqlKbDqHh/.

Terra Firme, filmed through what is believed to be the ‘real’ - the documentation of what is seen when walking in the streets - also expresses its ruins, its layers of time and its constant construction of both landscapes and ruins. In interviews lasting between two and four minutes, the interviewees appear in familiar settings, some within their own homes, recounting their arrival in the neighbourhood and what they know about its process of occupation. As these accounts unfold, multiple scenes of everyday life are shown, reinforcing narratives of the struggle for education, healthcare and other basic rights that run through the ongoing construction of Terra Firme.

Thus, the beauty that endures in these works lies in allegory, which survives the artificiality of ruins as an object of knowledge. A knowledge that gives life to the dead.

(...)

The work is an allegorical ruin that testifies to the been and not been of history, since it documents a realised past while at the same time pointing to what might have been and was not (the dream). (Abreu 2012: 32-36)

As we encounter these videos that speak so much of these neighbourhoods, I increasingly understand the streets as places of memory, carrying within them histories and moments of significance for the local population. It is in front of their homes that encounters and exchanges occur among neighbours, yet it is also there that the collective stirs into action to reclaim its histories, ensuring that its memory and its record, even as a performative and mobile organisation or event, bring these narratives into existence.

FINAL REMARKS

Moving beyond a broad, generalised vision of the Amazon and foregrounding discussions of urbanities distances us from long-standing discourses - some of which date back several centuries -and also reveals the dispute over narratives through alternative perceptions that value these images created in micro-contexts from within and, at the same time, universally.

Like urban landscapes, the imaginary is dynamic. Both are constructed through everyday exchanges and overflow into artistic expressions in which fragments of what was and is recorded. The montages elicit present-day perspectives grounded in ruins that endure and reverberate in what is thought and created today. In this way, the neighbourhoods of Jurunas and Terra Firme, through audiovisual collectives and production companies, have been tracing their own modes of existence -producing images that are overtly political and lay claim to the creation of their own narratives.

Based on this research, therefore, I reaffirm my critique of the imaginaries constructed about the Amazonian region, which have allowed stereotypes to persist for centuries, distorting not only the relations with other countries or regions but also the Amazon’s own understanding of itself. The collectives, groups and production companies presented here - as well as the examples discussed -reify the reclaiming of narratives, with the primary aim of offering other perspectives of the city and the Amazon, rendering Amazonian imaginaries more complex. The baixadas emerge as sites of creative potential, articulating symbols and elaborating ways of producing culture from within their own spaces.

REFERENCES

• ABREU, Elane de Oliveira. 2012. “A ruína e a força histórico-destrutiva dos fragmentos em Walter Benjamin”. Cadernos Walter Benjamin, 9: 28-39.
• BERGSON, Henri. 1999. Matéria e memória São Paulo: Martins Fontes.
• DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. 2012. Quando as imagens tocam o real. Pós, 2(4): 204-219, nov.
• ECKERT, C., and ROCHA, A. L. 2013. Etnografia da duração: antropologia das memórias coletivas em coleções etnográficas Porto Alegre: Marcavisual.
• GAGNEBIN, Jeanne Marie. 2012. “Apagar os rastros, recolher os restos”. In: Sabrina Sedlmayer; Jaime Ginzburg, Walter Benjamin: rastro, aura e história Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG. pp. 27-38.
• SANSOT, P. 1983. “Identité et paysage”. Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, (18): 65-72. https://www.persee.fr/doc/aru_0180-930x_1983_num_18_1_1069
  » https://www.persee.fr/doc/aru_0180-930x_1983_num_18_1_1069
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• SIMMEL, Georg. 1998. “A ruína”. In: Jessé Souza; Berthold Öelze, Simmel e a modernidade Brasília: UnB. pp. 137-144.
• TURNER, V. 1974. O processo ritual: estrutura e anti-estrutura Petrópolis: Vozes.
• VELHO, G. 2003. Projeto e metamorfose: antropologia das sociedades complexas Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed.

• 1
  Latex extraction became a major economic interest in the late nineteenth century, attracting the attention of European and North American markets. This was the beginning of the famous rubber boom, which proved foundational to the economy of the period, particularly in the Amazonian capitals of Manaus and Belém, as the industrial revolution made rubber a highly valuable commodity used in a wide range of manufactured goods. As a result, consumption patterns, architectural styles and social behaviours were increasingly imported from Europe into the Amazon region, helping transform Belém into what became known as a Petit Paris.
• 2
  Baixadas are understood as areas of the city formed by floodplains, prone to flooding due to their proximity to rivers and streams. These conditions often result from the landfilling of waterways during the city’s urban development. As a consequence, flooding and inundation become frequent in these geographically lower-lying zones during periods of heavy rainfall — hence the term.
• 3
  “Le paysage, c’est ce qui n’a pas besoin d’être explicité, porté à la lumière parce que nous le vivons tous ensemble, et, lorsque nous en parlons, c’est sur le mode du sous- entendu ou avec un accent et une pointe de connivence qui échappe à l’homme du dehors et qui le désigne comme tel, même s’il possède une bonne connaissance biologique dudit milieu” (Sansot 1983: 66).
• 4
  A black woman, born and raised in the Jurunas neighbourhood, Joyce is a journalist, actress and founder of the Telas em Movimento project, as well as founder and executive director of Negritar Filmes e Produções, a company that works directly with ‘black, peripheral and Amazonian narratives,’ according to its social media profile.
• 5
  Folk dances associated with the June Festivals (Festas jJninhas) celebrated throughout Brazil but associated especially with the country’s northeast.
• 6
  Video Cine Dance: o pulsar do corpo preto. Available at https://youtu.be/o-GL2mWiNQU. Accessed 20 October 2021.
• 7
  Video PoAme-se: amor, liberdade e poesia preta. Available at https://youtu.be/mDSghYa_vp8. Accessed 20 October 2021.
• 8
  Video O Amor Tem Cheiro de Pimenta e Cominho. Available at https://youtu.be/-GVfABQ5dcM. Accessed 20 October 2021.
• 9
  YouTube channel of Telas em Movimento, where videos produced in workshops and editions of the event can be found: https://www.youtube.com/@TelasemMovimento
• 10
  Video from GabyChella. Available at https://youtu.be/LLCKtvOSlRc. Accessed on May 5, 2022.
• 11
  Video Gaby Amarantos — Live in Jurunas — Show Completo (2011). Available at https://youtu.be/xZurp_HAcP4?si=88ua_8TeAtNTgYGS. Accessed in June 2018.
• 12
  Short film Limoeiro — Mostra Amazônia em Telas, available at https://youtu.be/7ldD4nALlMs?si=vzGSCMytzKja6HL1. Accessed on 13 January 2024.
• Data Availability Statement
  The dataset and research analyses presented herein is further detailed in the author’s doctoral thesis, available in the Federal University of Pará repository under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs): https://repositorio.ufpa.br/items/31066f03-55ad-49d9-88d1-cb38f44d118c

Edited by

• Dossier Editors
  Adriana Facina
  Programa de Pós-graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
  http://[e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9381-5134
  Silvia Capanema
  Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, pesquisadora de Pléaide/Campus Condorcet, pesquisadora bolsista CNRS CREDA-IHEAL (2024-2025)
  [e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1607-2055

Data availability

The dataset and research analyses presented herein is further detailed in the author’s doctoral thesis, available in the Federal University of Pará repository under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs): https://repositorio.ufpa.br/items/31066f03-55ad-49d9-88d1-cb38f44d118c

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 July 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  31 May 2025
• Accepted
  04 Feb 2026