SHEETS FORGOTTEN AT THE RED RIVER – URBAN INTERVENTION

Abstract

  The photos register the site-specific urban intervention that took place at the margins of the Red River. It acts and interferes in the river’s landscape, relates to the Red River’s history as grounds for social manifestations, work and memory of the City of Goiás. In order to accomplish this proposition I have researched photos of the washers working at several locations of the river. They are registers of the beginning and middle of the Twentieth-Century, belonging to Goiás’ museums. In the photos, the women are washing clothes in the river, always in groups. The old washers’ testimonies are key material for the elaboration of the work’s concepts. It was before sunset, on the 28^th of September of 2009, that bluish sheets were placed to “quarar” (Portuguese slang term, means ‘to dry’) on the large stone at the margins of the Red River, which seemed to cover almost the entire area of the huge rock. A little further up the river, near the Carmo Bridge – a place embedded in memories, for it is one of the washers’ favorite sites – twenty-five large aluminum bowls were distributed, some with white sheets “soaking” and others filled with water and blue ink. They were all over an island, which in turn was covered with ground vegetation, that the river presents by its riverbed before the rain arrives. Great washed sheets were “hung” up on a rope and stuck on the structures of the bridge under the Casa de Cora (the house where Cora Coralina, a famous native artist, lived, and is now a historical landmark). The sun was rising, and the Red River ran with clear waters and mirrored the scenario, duplicating everything, the sheets and the very blue sky. Keywords: landscape, memory, urban intervention, photo.