As the Brazilian government started the construction sites to diverse the waters of the
Sao Francisco river, the second major Brazilian river, we took off from Sao Paulo to spend
a month on a floating studio situation, from where we made daily reports, collected images
and samples of what signifies a river that will be rectified, and brought artistic public
interventions as a dialogue starter, to establish a contact with the peoples living on the
margins of the Old Chico.
We crossed thousands of kilometers, in 2008, of a very precarious landscape on a boat,
feeding websites and putting up public interventions, in places where even electricity was
scarce, and cellular technology had yet to arrive, is a breakthrough in survival and
professional skills. However, this was not the main point of the project which was a
laboratory of subjectivities, ours and of the lives of those who encountered us.
Marcia Vaitsman 