It is quite an original theme that brings together about forty photographs and almost as many sculptures in an exhibition which started December 5th at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio De Janiero. “Carrancas” – figureheads in English – is the name given to the figures on the prows of boats on the São Francisco river – one of Brazil’s great rivers – they have been the research subject of the exhibition’s curator Lorenzo Mammi, who has studied this topic for a year and a half to create what is today the exhibition entitled ‘The Voyage of the Figureheads’.
To tell the story of these figures of women or supposed animals protecting the boats from marine monsters of evil spirits, Mammi gathered a substantial amount of informations and was particularly interested in a series of photographs taken in 1946 by Marcel Gautherot as he travelled the Bahia region in the company of the ethnologist and photographer Pierre Verger.
When the two photographers visited the banks of the São Francisco river, the figureheads had already begun their decline. Motor boats, faster and more efficient than the wooden watercraft travelled the river and the making of figureheads had already stopped. However the boats ornamented with figureheads still travelled about, and Gautherot and Verger arrived just in time to freeze the memory of this popular Brazilian art in the form of photographic evidence. The report by Marcel Gautherot, published the following year in the journal O Cruzeiro, revealed a public infatuation with the figureheads, whose production resumed for a few more years in response to orders from collectors.
The exhibition spread through 5 rooms presents an historical approach to the subject, but across the great number of Gautherot’s photographs and original contact sheets which are on show, it is the scope of the photographic work that is most certainly a revelation, and that gives its consistency to this story of the Voyage of the Figureheads.
EXHIBITION
A Viagem das Carrancas
Until 20th march 2016
Institut Moreira Salles, Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 476, Gávea
CEP 22451-040 – Rio de Janeiro/RJ
Brasil
http://www.ims.com.br/ims/visite/exposicoes/viagem-das-carrancas/exposicao
