Canoas Caiçaras gif, 250 frames, 1080 x 1080 px 2022
Glitch photogrammetry created with databent obj. models and photographs taken on a local beach in São Sebastião, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2022.
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Caiçaras are the traditional inhabitants of the coast of Southeastern Brazil. Many of them are independent fisherman who bring their day's catch in hand-made canoes carved out of a single tree trunk. Since a well-tended canoe can last from 30 to 70 years, depending on the type of wood, many of these traditional canoes are passed down like heirlooms and given the names of daughters. It is said that in Caiçara communities, you won't earn a father-in-law's blessing in marriage without owning your own canoe.
Building a Caiçara Canoe is often a family business, as the right trees are hard to come by and require government permits to cut down. It can take at least a year to get a permit, if you are lucky enough to have an uncle in the environmental agency. Securing a single log fit to be a canoe is hard enough, but then there is the arduous process of carving a canoe by hand.
These are not just pretty boats on an idyllic tropical beach, but the product of a social practice rooted in a region's history. Generations of Caiçara fabrication knowledge goes into fashioning a Canoe --the secret ratios of trees, the specific curves that can repel a crashing wave, the hand as tool and measure. Many fisherman will get their canoes from local master builders, like a grandfather whose nickname translates to "Mr. Little Son." To be Brazilian is to watch time collapse even when crafting a canoe. The old man wields a machete and chainsaw as if the earth spun backwards.
(For reference, here's a short 2008 documentary by USP researchers and the Instituto Costa Brasilis - https://youtu.be/DIeMOQcg2iQ - in Portuguese)
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Bio:
Sabato Visconti is a Brazilian new media artist and photographer based in Western Massachusetts whose work centers around glitch and post-photography. They began experimenting with glitch in 2011 by databending photographic image formats. Since then, Sabato has sought to interrogate imaging practices that have become absorbed by digital processes, hybridized media, online networks, and machine intelligence through works that portray subjects entangled in systems often designed to fail or malfunction.
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