Denis Rouvre

It’s the day after. After the blackout and the chaos. The day when life starts to return.

It’s all collapsed; nothing remains of the past. But hope has not vanished with the night. The sun rises on a numb planet, and, for the living, everything has to be reinvented. From the scorched sand of Jericoacoara, from the smoking ruins of the towers of Fortaleza, they returned, immortal and glorious. They were thought to be extinct, forgotten, vanquished, crushed by conformism and ordinariness, but that was to ignore the resilience that smouldered in their hearts. Listen to their silent scream: "Don’t forget there’s a portion of God in you!" A portion of eternity, of sunshine, of stars and mud, which triumphs over all disasters. This post- apocalyptic scenario is the backdrop for all possible imaginings. What does the future hold for those who stay ? What kind of utopia can be invented ?

The end of this world has given rise to fifteen imaginary tribes. Magical women and men born of equally magical landscapes. They come from all around, from all different backgrounds. Their only baggage is the legacy of their roots; all they carry are the remains of our vanished societies and what nature still has to offer. These survivors carry freedom like a flag. Emancipated from the straitjackets of the past, they have the power to re-enchant things, even the ruins of the old world. Underlying their imaginary identities, these contemporary heroes offer us an ode to the living world, to the implacable beauty of nature and human beings, to their resilience, rejecting all predictions of the end of the world. They are connected by the “here and now”: together they write a new mythology in progress that only Brazil has the power to produce. Denis Rouvre reaches out to them and recounts the saga of a turbulent land that is constantly reinventing itself.

Nestling in north-eastern Brazil, Jericoacoara has become the cradle of a new humanity. This protected Garden of Eden offers the idyllic setting for a new form of life that has emerged from the ashes. Born of these lagoons, these windswept dunes, these caves hollowed out by the waves, and the dry vegetation of the Ceará sands, these tribes are at one with their environment. Under this new sun, the sand sticks to their skin and the vegetation, mangrove bark and palm leaves are turned into body adornments. With them are combined the flotsam washed up by the tide: a fishing net, a turtle carcass, the remains of a lifejacket or a car bumper... the last surviving clues to a vanished world. Jericoacoara has chosen its people: the happy few for a possible future. Free spirits, surfers and utopians who have made the protected natural environment of the national park into their promised land. No living thing has ever been more worthy of this name, transforming opportunities into strengths so that the first chapter of a new world can be written, a world whose freedom is as beautiful as it is dizzying.