URBAN NARRATIVES: A VIDEO-LETTER PROCESS WITH THE
NEWSPAPER BOCA DE RUA

NARRATIVAS URBANAS: UM PROCESSO DE VIDEO-CARTA COM O JORNAL BOCA DE RUA

ABSTRACT

The
present study shares the process of the collective achievement of a
video-letter regarding the city of Porto Alegre, made with a group of directors
of the Boca de Rua
(Street Mouthpiece) newspaper, which is made by the homeless people of Porto
Alegre. It highlights a perspective that sees in the narrator of the city its
expression, and bets that there is sharing and sociability stemming from the
fragments of narratives produced by the multiplicities that compose it. As a
basis, it introduces some concepts of narrative and self-narrative, assuming,
based on psychoanalytic theory, that the “I” is eccentric to the subject, and
that the self exists as a partial construction. Through the authors W.
Benjamin, P. Ricoeur, J-M. Gagnebin,
J. Butler e J. Lacan, it points out the importance of composing narratives in
the assembly of oneself and the city, creating connections when appropriate, or
even legitimizing the fragmentary character of the narrative. The article ends
by presenting some narratives composed after the recordings made with the group
in the locations chosen by them.

Keywords: Boca de Rua newspaper. Video-letter. Porto Alegre.
Self-narrative.

RESUMO

O presente estudo compartilha o processo de
conquista coletiva de uma vídeo-carta sobre a cidade de Porto Alegre, realizada
com um grupo de diretores do jornal Boca
de Rua, feito pelos moradores de rua de Porto Alegre. Destaca uma
perspectiva que vê no narrador da cidade sua expressão e aposta que há
compartilhamento e sociabilidade decorrentes dos fragmentos de narrativas
produzidas pelas multiplicidades que a compõem. Como base, introduz alguns
conceitos de narrativa e autonarrativa, assumindo, com base na teoria
psicanalítica, que o “Eu” é excêntrico ao sujeito e que o “Eu” existe como uma
construção parcial. Através dos autores W. Benjamin, P. Ricoeur,
J-M. Gagnebin, J. Butler e
J. Lacan, ressalta a importância de compor narrativas na assembleia de si e da
cidade, criando conexões quando apropriado ou até legitimando o caráter
fragmentário da narrativa. O artigo termina apresentando algumas narrativas
compostas após as gravações feitas com o grupo nos locais escolhidos por eles.

Palavras-chave: Jornal Boca de Rua. Vídeo-carta. Porto Alegre.
Autonarrativa.

INTRODUCTORY COURSE

This
article tells the story of a meeting with a working group, a research field,
some cities, paths chosen and others taken in error. It is doubled and
redoubled memory of the composition of an experience, an archive and the
production of narratives stemming from it. This meeting took place in mid-2000
and the temporal distance made this process a piece of different and many files
from that time, including a master's dissertation, a video letter, memories
shared in several conversation circles, but that had not been brought together
as an article. Why tell this story again? Does this file still make sense
(almost) 20 years later?

Regarding
the concept of narrative[1],
we experience, in Brazil, a particularly critical moment. The appropriation of
this concept to legitimize false news, “reinterpretations” of historical facts,
disregarding the mediums/archives/experiences from which the narratives
originate from, has become a great asset of fascism, whose strong growth in
Brazil since the year of 2016 we have closely monitored. Imposing a unique way
of seeing events under the relativistic argument that all facts are what they
are based on forms of interpretation and ways of narrating, has been the
commonplace on social networks and in communication in general, on the city
streets. Is everything a matter of point of view? Could it be? We need to
understand what's it all about nowadays when we talk about the production of
narratives, and this author believes that sharing this work, precisely at this
historic moment, can contribute to this reflection.

In
the early 2000s, it seemed urgent to produce and circulate narratives that
would minimally account for the multiple city experiences that existed in Porto
Alegre. In spite of the spectacularization of urban
life, visible in the increasingly ostentatious advertisements within the city
streets, and in the subjectivity model pursued at cost
by the more affluent social classes, with a correlating growing alliance
between public power and large companies, other cities would be produced every
day on the same grounds. It was a political gesture to make these other cities
visible, which took place under the billboards, of the speeches propagated in
the disputes over territories between practitioners/residents of the cities and
the more or less apparent objectives of capitalizing urban spaces and
experiences.

In
addition, helping to make legitimate, through the transmission and circulation
of narratives, these other forms of life, would also legitimize, at least a
little, the experience of those who imagined themselves outside the city,
outside the postcard, the billboard, or of any representation of the city And
they were indeed out, as we all were, as everything alive was out of that
project, but certainly the circulation through the spectacular planned spaces
would not be the same for those who have money and those who do not.

The meeting with a group and with a
project that was also starting at that time, the newspaper Boca de Rua (Street Mouthpiece)[2],
belonging to the homeless, was a stumbling block in the known city of Porto
Alegre, and with them it was possible to travel through so many different
cities that, with all this time separating the present from that period, still
remains producing senses and deranging spectacular cities wherever one goes..

It also affirms a paradigm that sees
in the narrator of the city its expression, and bets that there is sharing and
sociability stemming from the fragments of the different voices, which do not
make a unison, and that, when clustered together, do not assemble a single city
figure. It perceives in the turbulence and catastrophe ways of understanding human
societies, which implies a perspective of the city as a temporal object, whose
landscape is the impression of the various temporalities present in the
movements of its inhabitants
(ECKERT e ROCHA, 2005, 86-87).

In
addition, this way of interpreting turns the itineraries of the inhabitants
into protagonists, establishing them as the shapers of the inhabited spaces in
the city, and not simply the effects of public and private policies.

The
city reappears as expressive manifestations of human gestures that make it rise
to the legitimate status of “inhabited space”, thanks to its absolute autonomy
as a poetic space, full of the images and stories attributed to them. As a
result, urban spaces built and lived, as an ethnographic object, are revealed
not as mere reflections of urban policies, but as hosts for the traditions and
biographies of their inhabitants whose narratives express a collective language
that communicates a plurality of identities and memories, remitting their
territories to pretexts and human manipulations.” (ECKERT e ROCHA, 2005, 87)

This
article begins by presenting some concepts of narratives and their fundamental
role in the constitution of the subject-inhabitants of the city, as well as the
narrated spaces. Soon after, it presents the work process with members of the Boca de Rua
newspaper, how this meeting took place and what methodological choices shaped
this intense work, where affections were mobilized to produce a video letter
about the city of Porto Alegre, and ends with some narratives of scenes from
the recording of this video, chosen by necessity to make the text fit to this
format.

1. ABOUT THE
WORK WITH NARRATIVES

The act of
narrating, in Walter Benjamin's work, is linked to the ancient concept of històrié, linked
to travelers' arts of recounting and crafting practices. The narrative is the
place for the transmission of a “treasure”, a teaching, that the end of a
journey confers. The dying man, being a threshold between two worlds, is a privileged narrator, can speak of the journey of
life with the wisdom of the end and announce the secret of death. Benjamin
associates the crises of the narratives with the denial and the removal of
death from everyday life that marks modernity.

It also
draws attention to the relationship between death and the narrative by
emphasizing forgetfulness as a necessary production, realizing that the
narrative, when formalizing a memory, produces forgetfulness. The dialectic
between remembering and forgetting is the movement of memory and the stories
told. Remembering, forgetting, remembering, this forgetfulness produces
“fringes”, ornaments in time.

In
Benjamin’s work, the narrative is linked to the concept of aura, which will
work both on the considerations about the technical reproducibility of works of
art and on issues related to the crisis of traditional narratives. The Narrator
imprints their own life on the event, which passes on to the listener as a
trail, which allows they to both look and be looked at, at the same time, by
the narrative. The other modern forms of communication, brought together mainly
by the advent of the press, intend to report the event by clearing precisely
this trace of origin, in the Benjaminian sense, which
would convey the auratic familiar strangeness, the
trait of the singularity of those who tell a story. The singular has nothing to
do with manipulation, lying, or truth, but concerns a trait of style, normally
thoughtless, unconscious, which passes on to the listener and which, a posteriori, is seen as a style.

In
“The book to come”, Blachot proposes that the
narrative holds in itself the event, the encounter of chance, which it
transmits with its own language, as the usual language cannot handle this
transmission. It makes the inevitable bridge to fiction as a support for the
shadow, the night, the passion, that which is transmitted without intention: It narrates what cannot be reported. We
narrate what is too real not to ruin the conditions of the measured reality
that is ours (BLANCHOT, 2005, 272). Movement of the establishment of
temporalities and metamorphoses, the narrative is the event itself, not its
report, in the words of the author, it is a “siren song”, something further
ahead, already past, but that will soon prove not to be a decoy, it is, in
itself, a passage from the real and imaginary registers.

With
the weaving of time and narrative Paul Ricoeur
produces a beautiful work that articulates itself around the question: what is
time? For him, narrating is always doing a temporal reconstruction and without
the narrative, we could not speak and divide time, there would be no duration
of/in time.

Tying together memory, time and narrative, is
the motto for his thinking about identity, which aims to overcome the harshness
which make up this concept. Narrative identity would be the way of giving
character to temporalization, restoring the necessary movement from
intrigues-events, which metamorphose and allow characteristics to last, but
differ. This author proposes that the narrative identity occurs in the interval
of the sameness, self-identity, and ipseity, of the maintenance of the self. It
would be a way of producing the variation contingent to what is in time, “making the character narrable,
the narrative restores the movement, abolished in the acquired dispositions, in
the sedimented identifications” (RICOEUR, 1990, 171) (BECHLER, 2011)

The
question of identity arises through the work of time. How to say that it is the
same, how to say that it is another, in the passage of time? The entire work of
the narrative is to produce this variation, supported by the character that
will move itself, move the narrative and give consistency to time. Ricoeur in Time and Narrative proposes the self as another:
“the narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called
his or her identity, in constructing the story told. It is the identity of the
story which makes the identity of the character.” (RICOEUR, 1990, 176).

Ricoeur (1990)
points out that the narrative identity occurs in the very movement of
assembling the self, an activity that lasts a lifetime and that makes the
intersection between history and narrative:

I then elaborated the hypothesis according to which the narrative
identity, be that of a person or of a community, would be the sought place for
this intersection between history and fiction. According to the intuitive
pre-understanding we have of this state of affairs, do we not make human lives
more readable when they are interpreted in terms of the stories that people
tell about them? And aren't these life stories, in turn, made more intelligible
by applying narrative models – intrigues – borrowed from history itself or
fiction (drama or romance)? It would therefore seem plausible to consider the
following chain of assertions: self-understanding is an interpretation;
interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs
and symbols, a privileged form of mediation. (RICOEUR, 1990, 138)

While
working with the ethics of psychoanalysis, it must be assumed that the narrative
involves a work of listening, of interpellation and addressing the speech, that
is, it always presupposes an Other. The position of
the subject who enunciates, for psychoanalysis, accuses the irreducible
character of the self that “tells itself” when speaking of itself, as a
character in the narrated history.

“In any and
all statements, the subject is, at the same time, the one who tells and the one
that is told. This is for a very simple reason. For someone to be able to
enunciate anything, they need a movement of language appropriation. That is,
they need to be in the position of the master of their own speech. At the same
time, in the argument they build, they are the object of that same speech, even
if they do not recognize themselves in this condition.” (COSTA,
1998)

An original alienation from the
Other limits the possibility of a narrative of the reconstitution of the self,
the effort to present the “I” always fails, and must be relaunched in the
adventure of telling, summoning others - places, people, affections, in the
composition of this “unfounded” story, a fiction that is produced and does not
cease to be failure, hesitation, stumbling and also production, creation.
Because the most flawed part of the story of this “I” that is told, is precisely
that of its constitution, there is an essence outside itself, which
psychoanalysis points out as impossible to access via consciousness, seeing as:

“No doubt the true I is not the
ego. But that is not enough, for one can always fall into thinking that the ego
is only a mistake of the I, a partial
point of view, the mere becoming aware of which would be enough to broaden its
perspective; sufficient for the reality which has to be reached in the
analytical experience to reveal itself. What's important is the inverse, which
must always be borne in mind – the ego is not the I, is not a mistake in the sense that classical doctrine makes it a
partial truth. It is something else – a particular object within the experience
of the subject. Literally the ego is an object – an object that fulfills a
certain function which we here call the imaginary function.” (LACAN, 62-63)

Lacan
situates the radical eccentricity of the self in regard to the subject as a
crucial point of Freudian psychoanalysis after 1920. According to this
perspective, the narrative montage of the “I” is a partial and temporary work.
The fullness of the narration of this self is always unsuccessful because it
implies a time prior to the subject, a time of immersion in the inapprehensible
social-language, of which it is an effect.

“The ‘‘I’’
who begins to tell its story can tell it only according to recognizable norms
of life narration. We might then say: to the extent that the ‘‘I’’ agrees, from
the start, to narrate itself through those norms, it agrees to circuit its
narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in the telling
through modes of speech that have an impersonal nature. Of course, Lacan has
made clear that whatever account is given about the primary inaugural moments
of a subject is belated and phantasmatic, affected irreversibly by a Nachträglichkeit.
Developmental narratives tend to err by assuming that the narrator of such a
narrative can be present to the origins of the story. The origin is made
available only retroactively, and through the screen of fantasy.” (BUTLER, 2015, 73)

Often times, albeit partial, this narrative is also barely intelligible,
difficult to be described by narrative means. By recognizing the fundamental
importance of the construction of self-narratives, as well as the partial,
fictional and often necessarily fragmentary character of these constructions,
when dissociations are radically imposed, for example, in traumatic events,
this work gained shape and foundation.

In the construction of visual
narratives, this space of presentation/testimony of the lives of each person in
the city of Porto Alegre was sought after, a work that involved the exchanging
of stories, in rounds of conversations, of the singular paths taken in the
city. This other place had been assumed, the addressing of the video letter, a
group with similar characteristics but with presumed differences and knowledge,
as an imaginary support for this narrative construction.

To make a gathering of elements of
well-lived and living existences: speaking, recording, editing, writing,
narrating, transmitting and also erasing, renouncing, silencing, forgetting,
opposing to the infinite of memory, the finitude of what was
said/written/recorded. To move the fringes of time, producing memories and
lapses, supporting the assembly (and also the downfall) of this self-narrative,
which is also a narrative of the city, produced while in stride.

2. ABOUT A WORK PROCESS:
VIDEO-LETTER CARTA DE PORTO ALEGRE
(LETTER FROM PORTO ALEGRE) (2004)

The idea was
to make a video showing the city of Porto Alegre to homeless people living in
São Paulo, sellers of the OCAS magazine[3]. It would be the
realization of a correspondence hinted at at for a
long time, and the video project derived precisely from an interrupted
correspondence. In this case, I was a kind of unsuccessful mailwoman. At the
end of 2002 I was already working with the team that was producing, along with
the homeless, the newspaper Boca de Rua. As I was about to travel to São Paulo, I commented
on my absence and that I would most likely visit the OCAS magazine
headquarters. I asked them if there was something they'd like to know about the
people involved in the project, or about the magazine, and I was surprised by
the countless questions that came up for me to take there: How do they buy drugs? What are they doing in order to get rid of drug
addiction? Do they help each other? Do they have solidarity with one another?; How is prison in São Paulo? Do they have the right
to visitation?; Do they sleep on the streets? How did
they find themselves on the streets?; Did the brigadians (their way
of calling the military police) attack them there too?; What types of drugs do
they use? Crack, marijuana, loló?; What do they do with the money raised by
the selling of the magazines?; Don't they think that their speech is missing in
the magazine?; How long have they been working on this project?; Do they like
to work on this project?; Does the magazine have an association, a cooperative?
Does it have any support?; Do they live in shelters
like the ones in here?;

The
questions gave rise to broader commentaries about the city of São Paulo, such
as the following statement: in São Paulo
people truly die. The imagery of a distant city, the assumption of similarities
and differences, left me very stimulated, as there was a potential
communication channel opening up. However, arriving in São Paulo, I realized
that I had forgotten the questionnaire. Nevertheless, I made
contact with the magazine's organizers and found its vendors in
different parts of the city. In the conversations with them I realized that the
interest in Boca de Rua's
work was also great, and that some people already knew about the existence of
the newspaper by its presence in the World Social Forums.[4]

When I
returned to Porto Alegre, the idea of the video letter came up clear, marked by
the group's willingness to exchange experiences, and also by listening to an
imagery of a city full of singularities, fears, desires, powerful in
transmitting the many experiences of the cities within Porto Alegre or São
Paulo. I realized that the newspaper Boca
de Rua discussed the city all the time, but at
that period, the text, impregnated with the necessary denunciation, sometimes
impoverished its critical reflection, and whoever approached the group realized
that its content and form could do with a creative leap. Why not invent and
eclipse the city with these perspectives, producing outlooks of the city that
would represent each member of the newspaper? These images would have an
address, a commitment to transmission, a way of producing engaged to the
experience. Making a visual letter was a choice for literally including a point
of view, for giving contours, shapes and reflexivity to the imagination, as
well as transmitting it.

Despite
being another medium, the initial process of the video was very close to the
creation of the newspaper's texts. In a circle, we would talk about the urban
experience and about establishing images of the city. We decided early on that
the video would be about the city of Porto Alegre and would not address only
the world of those living on the streets, because all involved agreed that, in
the city, the different socio-economic realities and subjectivities are
related, even if unintentionally.

The
challenge that was posed from the beginning and that accompanied the whole
process was to find images that, when sent to a foreigner, could transmit a
little of the way of living in that city. To let those places in the city which
do not often coincide with the tour guides appear, for they were formed from a
unique perspective, as if it was a transmission of a look: the corner of República Street in that gap from which you can see, from
above the viaduct, a tip of the Redenção park.
Therefore, it was also the transmission of a certain time of that place. This
process involved delicacy and some difficulty, since it was about recognizing
the collective relevance of an outlook that is unique. What validity would this
image/outlook have regarding the image of a city? A little bit with Marco Polo,
from Calvino's Invisible Cities[5], a little with Walter
Benjamin's dodgers or Baudelaire/Flanêur[6], at the time it was
important to break with the idea of the city with a sole thought, a symptom of
the capitalization/gentrification of the spaces within the city, and to uphold
those figures who resisted being flour to thicken the mass of “passers-by”,
and, on the contrary, hindered the transit of the increasingly segregative senses and ways of living.

With a
markedly poetic narrative, committed to conveying the stumbles to which an
anonymous and staggering person is susceptible to in the city, I now read what
I wrote while questioning whether it was possible to do it in that same way
again. Incredulous of that possibility, I realize that the city is different,
and, above all, we are distinct. Distinct in moving around the city, distinct
in being Others in that city. In 2004, a concept known as Broken City was common in the Boca de Rua newspaper, a dichotomy between
those who had the conditions to move freely within the city and those who were
charged with credentials to transit in apparently public spaces, such as
galleries, shopping centers, and even on certain streets. Soon enough, some
security guard, previously invisible to me, would appear while I was being
accompanied by members of Boca de Rua, as if the
product of some magic, and inquire us about who we were and what we were doing
in that space. Sometimes we were asked to leave; sometimes we were escorted to
the place we wanted to go to (like a cinema inside a shopping mall, for
example). At that same time, it was also on the newspaper's agenda the topic of
places prohibited to those who, at the time, were known as ties wearers, understanding that being in a gated condominium and
always circulating in a car was also a way of being away from the city, a
prisoner in some way. The poetics in this context were a strategy of trying to
search for the grooves in that partition, and what other spaces were made through
this open crack, which of the places' youths we could reach in this
video-letter, if we looked for sections in those extremes.

At the beginning of this work, the Broken City was clear
through the representations that appeared in the choosing of the places to be
presented in the video. The first ones coincided with the tourist guide, even
though they were places rarely frequented by the group: the
Sunset Overlook at Guaíba Lake, the Street Market at Redenção, the Historic Center, the museums, the university.
When I inquired about their circulation in those spaces and the singular reason
(that is, what each of them could say about those spaces), the life on the
streets appeared through the conversations: mocós (an urban term for shelters made by the homeless), bridges,
sidewalks, the town center and, mainly, some places that assisted them by
providing food, soup kitchens, religious collectives. Only later on, in the
course of the project, did the diversity of places increase, and the
routes/dislocations around the city, specific to each member of the group, also
became a focus of interest for the study. However, all the while, there was
resistance to talking about their places of birth, and it seemed like there was
a barrier, a symbolic wall that divided their lives in the before and after
resorting to life on the streets; their places of childhood were warded, difficult to access.

Then, a
house appeared in a district of the city called Restinga.
The House of D. was so spoken about that anyone who knew Boca de Rua through the video-letter
project imagined there to be the newspaper's headquarters. This house was a
stopping point for several members of the group. D. had been at Boca for over 2
years and was brought there by her two daughters, P. and M..
She, in turn, brought in three more daughters - A.P., T. e M. - and a
granddaughter - E. - daughter of P. Boca
de Rua became a large family chain. Because P.,
M. and A.P. had friends and boyfriends who were members of Boca, who frequented that house with their own friends who also
passed through Boca, and every now
and then, someone from Boca de Rua was there in Restinga.
That was the first house, the first sign of intimacy in the face of city
monuments or mocós.

In the first reports, a paradox was constant: in the city
perceived as a lawless territory, without owners, no man's land, some places
classically understood as repellent to conviviality, made for car traffic,
almost opposing to human bodies, gained a narrative outline full of references
to intimacy and protection. As stated by B., during a conversation: “I lived my childhood in the Bat Cave. My
childhood was there, at the Bat Cave”.
And also, P. reports: “The only thing
I wish was for the Bat Cave to return. There never was a place like that again”. This enchanted place, which was able to
allow B. to live out his childhood, was almost a toy hut. Only with real
structure and in an unusual place. It was next to one of the Trensurb (Porto Alegre’s urban train system) tracks, under
a very busy viaduct, near a central bus station, in the north-center of the
city. The average speed of automobiles on those roads is 80 km/h, that is, it
is impossible to envision a house under that roadside. This place was also
remembered by P. and N.. Within the group, the Bat
Cave was reminiscent of a past temporality, according to N., a time when there
were still groups on the streets: The "dog gang", the Bat Cave crowd.
In the reports, it became a mythical place, between leaving home and the life
on the streets, an experience of the city outside their neighborhood of origin,
but also protected from the frightening anonymity. There they set up an
apartment, with a full kitchen, a bedroom, a living room.

Afterwards, a waterfall brought to the video-letter a
more remote type of childhood, far from the city center. P. recalled the
waterfall in which she, her sisters and her friends bathed, in Restinga, in the middle of a forest that, at the time of
this work, could still be found there. This populous neighborhood - it has as
many people as an average city in the interior of the state - is in the South
Zone of Porto Alegre and will be constant in the descriptions, memories and
stories during the video process. She said we could not go there nowadays, as
it was privatized; “the owner has
firearms and wouldn’t like to see us there. If I weren't accompanying you, you
might not be able to find it because the waterfall is well hidden”.

Even without knowing that waterfall, J. seemed to hear in
detail the rumble of water hitting the rocks of the hill, as P. had brought him
the memory of the countryside behind a pottery factory in the Sarandi district, where he had played in as a child. It was
a kind of artificial lake, made for the factory's use, in which children
bathed, hidden from the workers. The forbidden place became challenging. He
remembers that the neighborhood in the North Zone of the city was almost an
open field, with few houses around the pottery factory: “Sarandi was a rural area of the city. There,
livestock was raised and there were a lot of fields. We played in the fields
all the time. Nowadays everything is different. There are a lot of buildings
built there and everything is like a city”.

The lake of
the Pottery and the waterfall of Restinga have in
common this aspect of places discovered by intimacy. As with a beloved body, in
which signs, small wrinkles and tender points are gradually discovered, a space
also requires a certain intimacy to get to know it. And nothing better than
childhood, where the boundaries between bodies and places are still unclear and
extensive, to unravel in them the alleys, waterfalls, artificial lakes and
squares. These are spaces for socialization and experimentation, in which
relationships are expanded, and from where the original images of adult life
are harvested.

Some
squares have also been reported as frontier places between childish playfulness
and street life. I. grew up in a small square in São Geraldo, in the North zone
of the city:

That's how it is back there, you know? I grew up there since I was a kid
and there was this other small kid that was raised with me on the streets.
There I didn't get sick, and it was like a home to me because there, I had
everything. I had food. In the mornings, an "aunt" came and brought
food for everyone. Later in the afternoon they came, brought us coffee to drink
and after that, around midnight, we had blankets, everything, and we'd sleep.
We even made a tent in that square. And the boys who went there to skateboard
all knew us, they'd say to us - hey man, what's up! Do you want to hang out
back home anytime, play some videogames? - And we'd go... that's how it was
back there. And another thing is that there, in any bar that we'd go to ask for
something, they didn't say things like - go work! Go steal, so you can eat! -
No, there they'd go and give it to us.

Of those intimate places, the mocós are a
threshold between the public and the private, a space of the house and of the
street. In a mocó,
all of this exists on the slab of the street, on the bridges and monuments of
the city. Intimacy with the street itself, a place for being, an almost home, a
Bat-Cave. During the period when the video was being designed, there was almost
no mention of mocós,
or at least not any specific mocó. The Bat-Cave was a named, mythical mocó. The other mocós were always
"the mocós", as if they were any
other place. But as the project progressed, we were introduced to some other mocós and we
understood that several of the participants would like to showcase their mocós, so we went
on to visit some of them, but recorded none.

The project lasted three months until the
camera was introduced to it, first to experiment with it and then to start
producing the images. We would talk while looking at the city map and tracing,
from it, the most visible stories, impregnated with the images that the camera
was unable to capture. This extended time, of waiting before recording, was
precisely to provoke these images: paradoxically, the absence of a camera
seemed to have been necessary during this period.

The presence of Evgen
Bavcar[7] was very inspiring at that time in Porto
Alegre while thinking about the close, but sometimes too easy, relationship
between image and imagination. This Slovenian photographer, settled in France,
blind since he was 11 years old, understands the materiality of images and
bodies (as stated by him: The tactile
touch remains the sense of truth, since it cannot deny the materiality of
things[8]). In a singular way, due to his physical
limitations and his passion for worldly things, Bavcar
affirms the images by their absence. It is his pre-images, as the matrix of his
work is called, that he photographs. Mental images, which are formed before the
one that materializes on photographic paper, or on the digital camera's display.

They are made from the memories of the
images seen and the words that make up new arrangements for the
lived/remembered. An agreement made by him between word and image, two
categories that are only dissociated by this attachment to dichotomies and
categorizations, but which, on the plane of imagination, coexist fully,
although always tensioning one another.

So the initial project,
without the video camera, was an attempt to make the images appear before the
places. We would discuss: what are the necessary images of the city? Space-time
for sensations that were added to monuments, places, in the terminology of Certeau (1996), provide spaces:[9] In this sense, space is a practiced place. Thus the streets geometrically defined by urban planners are
transformed into space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the
space produced by the practice of a particular place - a written text (1996, 202) as in A.'s speech about Matriz
Square,

“I would make an image of
freedom, as if I were on the highest hill and could fly: on one side the
church, on the other the governor's palace, on the other the assembly, the
palace of justice, (and I ask: what is it? Justice? What is it?). There,
sleeping in those streets between them, I found a little friendship, I found
freedom, peace.”

Still in the beginning of the work, I
began to bring a map of the city so that we could visualize the places we were
talking about. Sometimes we would work literally on top of it. The idea is
that, while we were talking about the places to be shown, the map would be
streaked with the chosen routes. I took different colored pencils and imagined
so many other maps that would be formed from this intervention. Memory maps.

We encouraged the participants to write,
drawing the paths taken by each one of them, over the lines already drawn. But
what appeared were small dots, with colors very similar to those used for the
official markings of the map, thus making these features almost invisible. One
time I spoke up about it, asked if they were shy about drawing on the map we
were using or if they were shy about drawing, in a representation of the city,
their own paths. Even though I knew that these alternatives would be
inseparable, I received a direct answer from C.: the city is not mine. The city belongs to the rulers.

The feeling of not belonging to the city,
or of not having their own place in the city, was constant: while being in the
wrong place, while living in the wrong way, at all times someone was reminding
them of that. So, the invisibility of their presence on the map accompanied the
attempt to make their presence on the city street invisible. For those living
on the streets, invisibility is both dangerous and necessary. A camp must be
discreet, someone sleeping on the sidewalk must be invisible to outside eyes,
as this is the only chance to try to escape the interventions of police
officers, rangers, security guards, who invariably repress the action - with
varying degrees of violence, depending on the acting government and the corresponding
command of police brigades, and remove all personal property of those on the
streets (a mattress they managed to acquire, the clothes they had, a stray pot
or pan; in short, their belongings).

Most of these places marked discreetly on the
map spoke of the trajectory of life on the streets, places in which they had
lived for some time, and not infrequently, were chronological journeys from the
leaving of their homes, on the peripheries, to the town center, the destination
place of everyone I spoke to, when they decided (willingly, or, most of the
time, out of necessity) to leave home.

There is an abrupt cut at this point of
leaving home. Some did not speak of that other life lived at home, on the
periphery, far from the center. Through the paths travelled towards the center,
with brief stops in squares, or flaps of buildings, they tell some of their
stories of origin, births to another life, often changing their names. The town
center is described as a place for anonymous socialization, where the origin
can and, most of the time, must be reinvented.

Among the places spoken of by all, the
strong perception of the streets and alleys of the city center in the
constitution of each one's experience was evident, as in the expression of G.,
7 years old: XV Square is the most
wonderful place because it is beautiful! For a passerby visiting Porto
Alegre, this square can be seen as a place in the city polluted by the noise of
one of the most densely populated areas in its center, in addition to being
near one of the main urban bus terminals, a lot of commercial areas and little
living space. There were still some trees from the original project, which
dates from the beginning of the 19th century, its space greatly reduced
throughout the 20th century, with the square radically changing its ambience at
that time. Even so, it was a place that concentrated many differences and a
kind of festival of chance, between the sounds of street workers, the comings
and goings of the city center's invisible professions (prostitutes and various
types of illicit businesses), and the children felt particularly attracted to
it.

The town center was turned into an image
of the possibilities of existence beyond the determinisms of family conditions,
in meetings promoted by the street and whose identity is shaped by this
experience, as said by A.P. In the city
center everyone is the same, there in Restinga
everyone wants to be a prep or a playboy. When I went to school, I put on my
best clothes, but they kept saying that I always wore the same ones, they
called me dirty, lousy. In the center everyone is the same, they don't mess
with you. The project of the video-letter occurred while very marked by
this urbanity of the town center and its surroundings. I share some memories of
the recording moments of the video-letter, a few of them, which fit the page
limit.

3.
SPACES-NARRATIVES

3.
1 Festa

XV Square

The
XV Square is one of the oldest squares in Porto Alegre, its first project
dating from the beginning of the 19th century. After undergoing countless
transformations, including resizing, its area has greatly decreased. In this
square there is no lawn, there is no swing set, there is no fountain. It is
surrounded by so much visual and sound mix that one can pass right through it without
realizing. Except for the Chalé da Praça (Chalet of the Square), which has the beauty of old
buildings, and for some trees, also old and leafy, it draws attention mostly
because it shelters a colorful sea of stalls belonging to street vendors, in
which everything is sold. There was music everywhere: in the Chalet, Brazilian
songs were being played; in the stalls, a multitude of songs mixed themselves
with conversations on the vending circles of herbs and ointments, with many
people walking quickly towards the plaza of the Public Market.

Perhaps more than in other places, in XV
Square it was difficult to find an object to focus on. F. spent some time
looking at the place with an open camera, to later record it. Even so, we could
not find a stationary point. At all times, the camera continued
to chase after the numerous simultaneous events. A rush of police officers
invaded the space hosting the stalls and F. ran in that direction. We could
see, then, a legion of children who came out of somewhere, running with sticks
after the confusion, among the tents. They were between 4 and 8 years old, were
all together, and when we first got to the square, they apparently weren't
there. Afterwards we understood that they were there all along, we just didn't
see them. Were they already part of the square?

Minutes later, when returning from the
disturbance with the police, the children took over that space which seemed so
difficult for us to focus on. They offered themselves for the camera in such a
way that the square was limited to them. F. tried to clear them off, asking for
some time, but they all wanted to “appear on TV”. There were at least fifteen
children and adolescents dominating XV Square.

They seemed older, sometimes frightening
us with that adult gaze on a child's body. But the image of the square,
populated by those children, without adults surrounding and preventing
exchanges between them, was like that of a party. For they were, above all,
playing. A legitimate children's party. Where they could even experience the
adult space, in that carnivalized, deformed way of the miniaturized adult. This
place is a little reminiscent of street parties, from all ages. 7-year-old G.,
still in the video project, said: XV
Square is the most wonderful place because it is beautiful! And M.V., 21
years old: Square XV divides the city
into two sides, it’s truly like a heart.

3. 2 Fear of the Dark

Alfandega Square

Very
present in the representations of Porto Alegre, it is known as the Square of
the Book Fair, which in other times had been a place of literary-artistic
meetings during the evenings. Today, there are still traces of past times, a
line of shoeshines, chess tables, a handicrafts fair, and is surrounded by the
city's museums. An overlap of times that coexist.

But the nights in this square are not as
lively. Or rather, they are no longer for anyone. F. and I arrived around 8:30
pm. The craft stalls had already closed and the museums were keeping their
doors half open. There was still some movement of people, at the center of the
square, who seemed to be passing through towards their own appointments. Within
it, under the trees, on the benches of the square, a strange sensation of
suspense passed through us. A woman wandered around a bench alone, looking at
us elusively. As she noticed our presence, she looked away. She walked further
away when we approached. F. called her, telling her about the video and she
responded, very aggressively, that she did not want to appear in it. She then
left to the other side of the square, insulted.

Sitting on a bench, with a bag full of
things at his feet, was a 50-year-old man. I greeted him as I passed him by,
and he replied, smiling. F. returned and invited him to speak about the square
for the video-letter. In Castilian, he said he would be happy to do it.
Argentinean, he was in Porto Alegre after a season in São Paulo. He said that
he dreamed of seeing the landscapes he had already seen in photographs. And
that he chose Alfandega Square due to it being a safe
place to sleep, but it had been the second place he'd sought for since being
there. The first was XV Square. Despite it being very beautiful, he said, the
rowdiness there did not let him rest.

The Argentinean gentleman really did seem
to find rest in that place in which we could not be calm. There was a strange
atmosphere, perhaps too nocturne for that time of night. We walked glancing at
all sides, and people seemed to hide among the bushes, above all not looking
directly at us. They would lower their eyes or turn away. F. wanted to try for
another interview, now with a couple who seemed to be on a date under the
trees. The gentleman went straight to the point: look, if I were you, I'd leave here with this camera, because there are
already a lot of people looking at it, there was this guy around who almost
mugged you...

Even before, we knew that something was
wrong. Alfandega Square had never looked more
frightening to me. I realized that I had never been inside it at night. It was
a place of passage for me as well as for those people who walked through it
while coming back from work. The square was populated with people who did not
(or could not) be seen.

After that warning, we remained on the
square for a while longer. We walked nearby Rua da
Praia (Beach Street), where there was intense movement. People disassembling
tents, conversations on the street, bystanders. Still on the square, where it
makes a corner with that street, several people gathered around chess tables.
We decided to register that motion, that somewhat clearer part, in which the
square seemed penetrable. But we received another warning, now from a young
man, who somewhat frightened me, and I responded with an aggressiveness that
only that place could produce in me: Look,
they're saying around that you guys are from the FBI... the people here in the
square don't like to be filmed... if i were you, I'd
leave before anything happens.

I explained to the young man that we were
making a movie about the city and we were filming Alfandega
Square, and not focusing on the people, they were not even showing up properly,
as they were merged with the landscape. I insisted for him to look at the
pictures of the square with us, and I deleted all that, from a distance, could
identify him. F. was surprised by my reaction, as we were being threatened
directly. Afterwards, while remembering the scene, I was also surprised. In the
end, the young man complied with our presence and said we didn't need to delete
the images, that he would like to participate in the video. We said our
goodbyes, and F. could breathe a little better after we left. Due to that
reaction, we understood the instrument of power that we had in our hands.
Indeed, a video camera can document things that should remain invisible, and we
like the shadows. Some practices, when brought into the camera light, lose
their meaning, or gain other meanings not always desirable for those who appear
in it. Some lights are deadly, invisibility can often protect, and we knew
that.

3.3
Window

Bat Cave

I
didn't really have a childhood. My childhood... I don't know if it was very sad
or very happy... I know that whenever my mother took me to daycare I'd cry a
lot, I didn't want to stay in daycare... to me, in my thoughts, my childhood
wasn't very good... but I remember that I really liked to ride the bus... I'd
leave the house, ride the bus, then come back... I also played in squares (...)
my real childhood was sleeping in the Bat Cave... it was a mocó...
a hole inside the bridge... we had everything there... on the streets we had
music, television, we even had a refrigerator under the bridge. But then the
city hall came and took everything away... and closed it, put cement on it for
us not to go there anymore...

No other mocó was described to us during
the entire video project besides the Bat Cave. And, in fact, it has not existed
since 1999, when the City Hall closed due to it being a risk area. I had been
hearing about this place ever since I arrived at Boca de Rua. It was a reference for
remembering the childhoods of B., P., C., N., M. in addition to many others
that I did not get to meet. It seemed like a mythical place, such was its
organizing force, of time and space, as P. said: “the only thing left from there is our own memory… some have died,
others are imprisoned, others are so aimless, that not even we know where they
are anymore”.

We arrived at the bus terminal and climbed
through a small viaduct that leads to the freeway. We walk at least 100 meters
between cars, as there is no road shoulder there. C. guided us and did not
understand our fearful steps. He walked undaunted, eager to arrive at our
destination. He would point out several alternative
paths and some hiding places in other points of the viaduct (such as an
entrance at the junction of this viaduct where drugs were stored, or a
protective screen near it, the spot of injectable drugs users). He showed us
small holes in the asphalt that served as light and air entrances for those who
lived down there. A phobic sensation hit me as I imagined people residing under
the road. I pictured the heat, the noise, the shortness of breath, the strange
challenge of resting one's body under an endless stream of automobiles. It
seemed very contradictory that B. spoke of this cave as the venue of his
childhood, and I was surprised by the nostalgic animation with which C. showed
us this refuge.

Before descending to what was left of the
Bat Cave, C. located the electric power pole from which they pulled an
extension to the Bat Cave. They had a television, sound system, everything, as
he told us: We had everything in there,
that's when the police started to envy us and decided to take us out of there.
Then the City Hall came and ran us off and sealed off the place. He told us
of how the administration and coexistence took place in that space. Everyone
woke up at 5 am with the ringing of the natural alarm clock, which was the
first line of the train that left at that hour from the center of Porto Alegre
towards the city of São Leopoldo, and passed by the Bat Cave. They shared all
spaces for sleeping, eating, watching TV, as they occupied a small tunnel under
the viaduct where, in other times, a freight train would pass, transporting the
goods which arrived at the port. In fact, when we went down a small ravine to
get to Bat Cave, we were able to see the beautiful view from the inside: the
port and the open horizon of Lake Guaíba. Down there
I could feel a little of that feeling of spaciousness that I had been hearing
about for a long time at Boca de Rua, due to the possibility of abstracting the asphalt
when looking at the horizon.

But
that feeling was brief. Soon we left with two security guards threatening us,
guns drawn. They said that that roadside was a private area, a port area, and
that we were trespassing. After the scare and a lot of conversation, we also
had to hear from those men that C. had "the face of a crook" and that
that horizon had an owner. The memory of Bat Cave was narrated as this
undefined place within the public-private categories. And as a childhood space
where these barriers are, in fact, undefined.

3.4 Distances

Salgado Filho Airport

A. had expressed three dreams since I'd
met him, two years before recording the video: learning how to read, getting a
formal job, and flying by plane. It was this last dream that he chose to
transmit through images of the city. While we were planning the video, A. told
us he slept for long time on a lawn in front of the airport. From there he'd
see the planes taking off and wondered what it was like to fly, to be up there,
to see from above. He would imagine this from afar, as A. had never entered the
airport.

It was a surprise, for him, to learn that
he could go through the airport’s front door. We went to observe the planes
that were preparing to take flight. Me, him and L., another member of the
newspaper Boca de Rua.
Once again, his fascination for the place stood out when looking at the camera.
A. wanted to convey the amazement of his gaze towards the airplanes. He needed
to speak of what he had imagined, about the years of his life in which he flew
while standing still, in the same place: I'd
stay there daydreaming, watching the planes. At certain times, the planes
would switch to the background and A. would look into the distance, at the
hills he saw in the background. A plane would take off and he would watch it,
gaze tracing the sky. He'd like to be there, he said, and at the same time
revealed his fear of flying.

As
we left the building, I asked to see the lawn from which A. used to watch the
planes. He already seemed happy with the new interior perspective of the place,
to which he never had access to. Yet, he accepted to continue on to the place
that was our starting point. We walked down the street for about fifteen
minutes until we saw a large flower bed dividing the avenue. There was a lot of
rustle coming from the car flow nearby, which for me was out of step with the
tranquility that the place transmitted to him. It was, he explained, that there
was a place where he could rest without worrying about his things and also
where he could be alone for as long as he wanted. As for the noise, he said
that a tired body doesn't care much about it.

The image that A. wanted to convey was, in
the foreground, a large fence. In the background, with some effort, you could
see a plane. A. was looking, actually, at the airport workers, who prepare the
planes for the flight. He said to me: this is the kind of work that we can only
see from afar, outside the fence. I would rather say that this is a type of
work that is not really seen, unless one has the time to lie down in front of
an airport screen in contemplation. Unless one's entrance through the main door
is forbidden. Unless one does not travel on the plane but instead looks at it
from a distance.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

During the working process of the
video-letter, we made a choice of method, based on an ethics prompted by
psychoanalysis and inspired by cartographic and ethnographic works, we let
ourselves be guided by the possibilities, interests, paths of the team of the
Newspaper Boca de Rua.
We were not interested in producing a video-letter if it was not the product of
a collective construction work that would in fact have an interpellation effect
on the production of unique narratives about the city.

It was built collectively in all
stages: script, recordings, assembling, editing. So it
was also a job that always admitted the possibilities of failure, of not
existing as a product, or of the project having a complete change of direction.
I believe that the possibility of bankruptcy also inspired a collective effort
to invent a form, the “video-letter” medium, which welcomed the singularity of
looking at the city as a narrative element that could present the city in which
they lived, and in some way, present their own lives and the lives of others.
P. once said: What you are doing with us
is a kind of biography of each person, only through the places where we've been.

Once finished, the video-letter was displayed in
different locations, usually featuring the presence of its directors to
narrate/discuss the process and the content of the video. It also reached its
destination. C., a member of the group, took the video-letter “Letter from
Porto Alegre” to show to members of OCAS Magazine, in São Paulo. The delivery
took place during an event denouncing the impunity of the people accused of
ordering a massacre that killed seven homeless people, with repeated blows to
their heads, at Praça da Sé
in São Paulo, in 2004. There in São Paulo, C. left an invitation for the group
of vendors of the OCAS Magazine to respond to the video and to continue what
was insinuating itself as a network of videos about cities. But to this day,
that has never happened.

Boca de Rua continues to exist as one of the main newspapers
circulating in Porto Alegre, with content made exclusively by
narrators/reporters with a very unique city experience. It is also an important
source of income for its members and a possibility of social mobility with
another kind of legitimacy.

REFERENCES

BECHLER, Janaina. Labirintos:
Mapas invisíveis da Cidade. 2004, 100f. Dissertação (mestrado no PPG
Psicologia Social e Institucional) UFRGS, Porto Alegre, 2004.

BECHLER, Janaina.
Estudo para uma composição: cidade e narrativa. Revista Iluminuras. Porto
Alegre, v.12, n. 29, p. 219-236, jul/dez 2011.

BENJAMIN, Walter.
Magia e técnica, arte e
política. Obras
Escolhidas, vol. I São Paulo:

Brasiliense, 1993.

________________Charles Baudelaire um lírico no auge do capitalismo.
Obras escolhidas vol. III. São Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1994.

BUTLER, Judith. Relatar a si mesmo – Crítica da violência
ética. Belo Horizonte, 2015.

BLANCHOT, Maurice. O livro Por Vir. São paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.

CALVINO, ÍTALO. As cidades invisíveis. São Paulo:
companhia das letras, 1993.

ECKERT, Cornelia e
ROCHA, Ana Luiza Carvalho da. O tempo e a cidade. Porto Alegre, Ed.
UFRGS, 2005.

GAGNEBIN, Jeanne Marie. História e
narração em Walter Benjamin. São Paulo:

Perspectiva, 1994.

_____________________. Sete Aulas
sobre linguagem, memória e história. Rio de

Janeiro: Imago, 2005.

LACAN, Jacques. O Seminário: livro 2. O Eu na teoria de Freud e
na técnica da psicanálise (1954-1955). Rio de Janeiro, J. Zahar, 1985.

RICOEUR, Paul. O si-mesmo como um outro. Campinas, Papirus, 1991.

[1]              The
book Guerra de Narrativas
(War of Narratives): The political crisis and the struggle for control of the
imaginary (2018), by journalist Luciano Trigo, is
a document that evidences the radical thinking of the right-wing politics that
elected the current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.
Since the time before the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, which took
place in August 2016, this concept of “war of narratives” is commonly linked,
in the social networks supporting the president, with that of “political-party
education” and “ideological content”, which, according to the author of the
book “The left-wing associated with PT (the Brazilian political party named
Workers' Party) adopted the strategy of trying to win, through the narrative,
the dispute that was lost in the legislature, in the judiciary and in the
streets”. The word Narrative was associated, in the common sense, with a
deceptive discourse, with stories crafted in order to produce a false reality,
which, according to the journalist, has been practiced by the left-wing, linked
to the PT, in schools, universities, and that which, once unveiled by the
right-wing, had made PT lose popularity.

[2]              The Boca de Rua newspaper is a publication
made and sold by homeless people in the city of Porto Alegre, since August
2000. It is a project of the NGO ALICE - Free Agency for Children, Citizenship
and Education. Texts, photos and illustrations are elaborated by the homeless
during weekly workshops. The money collected in the commercialization of the newspaper
fully reverts to the group's participants, constituting an alternative source
of income. More information about the group's history, as well as access to the
newspaper's contents can be found here: https://jornalbocaderua.wordpress.com
(accessed in January 2020).

[3]              NGO
whose main project is OCAS Magazine, commercialized by homeless and extremely
socially vulnerable people.

[4]              The
World Social Forum is the main international annual meeting to think/discuss
alternatives and ways of confronting the current models of globalization of
neoliberalism and capitalist imperialism. It took place for the first time in
Porto Alegre, in 2001, and continued to be hosted there annually until 2005,
and then on to other cities. In the first event, the multiple themes were
gathered around the main axes: a) the production of wealth and social
reproduction; b) access to wealth and sustainability; c) the affirmation of
civil society and public spaces; and d) political power and ethics of the new
society. The newspaper Boca de Rua began to circulate in this first event, gaining
strength and visibility, and making an active presence in all other meetings,
which included coordinating conversation circles and workshops..

[5]                        Marco Polo responds to the Emperor of the Tartars when
he asks for a precise location of the city he described “(...) I shall repeat
the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities
we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread,
an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams:
everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a
rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are
made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret,
their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals
something else.” (CALVINO, 1993, 44)

[6]                      A reference to the text “On some themes in Baudelaire”
in which Benjamin writes about Baudelaire's work, mainly about his poetic
prose, in regard to Paris at the end of the 9th century. Throughout the text,
he envisages the figures brought by the poet, like the flâneur, with other
figures-characters of writers of the same period. The peculiarity of Baudelaire's
writing encourages Benjamin to think about the obsolescence of nascent
modernity in the image of the metropolises, the characteristics of a “modern”
model of subjectivation, with new modulations for perception and social
relations. “Despite everything”, the poet's attempt to create poetry from the
increasingly machinic streets, transmits a sort of shadow of his time, himself
a character who inhabits this time willingly, but restless.

“(…) For one thing, it tells us about the close
connection in Baudelaire between the figure of shock and contact with the urban
masses. For another, it tells us what is really meant by these masses. They do
not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but
the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street. This crowd, whose
existence Baudelaire is always aware of, does not serve as the model for any of
his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure.” (BENJAMIN,
1994, 113)

“To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special
purpose of the flâneur”(1994,
113)

“
(…) is no doubt a phantom crowd: the words, the fragments, the beginnings of
lines, from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests poetic booty.” (BENJAMIN,
1994, 113)

Les Fleurs
du mal (The Flowers of Evil),
a work by Baudelaire, is considered by Benjamin to be “the last work of lyric
to exert influence in the European sphere” (1994, 143) and even questions the
possibilities for the existence of lyric poetry. By quoting the prose poem
“Loss of the halo”, Benjamin does not recognize the flâneur in the writer: “The
semblance of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had
dazzled the flâneur,
had faded for him. To heighten the impression of the crowd's baseness, he
envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcasts, would readily
espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except
money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd -
with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the
nature of the immediate experience to which Baudelaire has given the weight of
long experience. He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could
be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience. He paid
dearly for consenting to this disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry.
This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as “a star without
atmosphere.” (BENJAMIN, 1994, 145)

[7]

[8]              BAVCAR Evgen.
A luz e o cego
(The light and the blind) IN The zero point of photography. Catalog of the
homonymous exhibition at the Sotero Cosme gallery of the Casa de Cultura
Mário Quintana in Porto Alegre, 2000.

[9]              CERTAU, Michel de. The Practice
of Everyday Life: arts of making. 2nd ed.
Petrópolis: Vozes, 1996. p. 202.