O dia seguinte - Tribos imaginárias urbanas
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.
In Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, it is as if the city has eaten its people. Far from the turquoise water along the beaches, there are forgotten favelas where the sky is low and the future is bleak, a hostile world where survival is everyone’s business. Below the skyscrapers, the huge city has nothing more to offer than the ruins of a withered civilisation. Its inhabitants, descended from Portuguese settlers, native peoples and black slaves, resist in the heart of this Brazilian Babylon. They are the survivors of a world swallowed up by concrete and carry with them everything people have left behind. Wearing clothes picked up from charities or sold by the kilo, the homeless people and prostitutes reaffirm their freedom when bodybuilders display an old fan or the remains of a hi-fi speaker on their muscles. All the excesses of overconsumption is transformed into flamboyant armour to cope with the realities of life on the edge. Prisoners of the crushing city, of the Pirambu favela in the São Pedro building, inseparably connected by their life stories, they seize a power that had been denied them until now. In the immensity of this world in the process of being reborn, these tribes within the Tribe now have their rightful place.
