Rodelas e o hidronauta: a contenção como desvio memorial no São Francisco

Abstract

From the Sobradinho complex to its mouth, the São Francisco river has a tense relationship with the containment and opening mechanisms in the design of its course, such as dams, transposition projects, canalizations, among other folds that are extensive to the modern project of civilization. Even with all the deviations of a different origins, the São Francisco escapes and flows into the sea. The effects felt by populations and cities submerged by the strangulation of the river in this process, are permanent and semanticize transformations, displacements, and by chain, guide the production of new meanings and subjectivities, memories and stories. The spaces freed by the friction of these forces, especially in the region of Rodelas, swallowed by the São Francisco River due to the Itaparica Dam, raise some questions. How are spatial senses established? How and who has the power to transform spaces into places? How is the landscape of a submerged city mirrored with the reconstruction of its spaces and memories in another place? In the midst of dealing with these problems, the pandemic nightmare collapses on research as yet another containment regime where everything seems to collapse. The compulsory shadow of this interdiction completely deviates the course of its progress by inserting the variable of sensations and imagination as a methodological hope in the face of the impossibility of field work. Between deaths and resurrections, the research decides to put itself at risk and experiment. It conflicts with the object of study and its relations of forces in the investigated space, getting lost in a spiral of temporalities and landscapes, by reinventing a temporal machine disarmed by the pandemic and entering, from a distance, into the memorial universe of Rodelas. In an atypical approach, but attentive to the pertinence of stories, signs and directions, the research performs in the superposition of two Rodelas, their symmetries and contradictions, producing an affective mapping of this space by drawing other perspectives and approaches through imagination in front of the dam.