neyde lantyer

“The past has not been conquered and continues to affect the present”, said the former president of Argentina Néstor Kirchner (...)
How does the violent past influence the present, and how can this be expressed in an artist’s work? These questions were my point of departure for Rivers flow out of my eyes.

WHAT HAPENNED TO THEM ?

In 2013, I started a research in the photo-albums of my family intending to track the lives of my female ancestors. I wanted to make sense of my mother’s life, a beautiful sensitive woman with many suppressed talents and dreams. Her youth, together with her sisters, was largely photographed. I was fascinated by those girls in fresh dresses and smiling faces playing in the gardens, dancing under the trees, laughing around the riverbanks. They lived privileged yet simple lives. Got married, had children, studied in private schools and graduated as elementary teachers, taking in their hands the education of 2 or 3 generations of children in the Sertão. They lived a prosaic daily life, distant from the domestic tasks and away from history. They didn’t seem aware that they lived in one of the poorest regions of the country. Canudos was nothing more than a literary event for them.

My research took a new direction when I discovered the story of their cook, a loving woman who sometimes went psychotic and ran into the woods, taking days to return home. She was a survivor of the war, still haunted by the memory of the brutality. An open wound in the past of the country, the conflict took place 200 kilometres away from my maternal village, coincidentally, around the time my great-grand parents got married. Currently, the old village is drowned - together with its 25.000 dead - by an artificial lake but the memory of the massacre still frightens as a ghost. I shifted from the family-albums to the photos of the struggle, particularly the photograph of the prisoners: a classic, well-composed, beautiful and devastating image, the picture of a tragedy - a tragedy of women. What happened to them? Even though the official documents hardly mention, 2/3 of the population of Canudos were women (about 16.000 individuals) and 300 recorded women and children survived the war. Those, looking at the photographer, in the picture. I discovered very little about them. Unofficial reports give notice that they were taken to the capital and sold as slaves or prostitutes and then disappeared, leaving no traces behind.

Nevertheless, those women live on today. 122 years later, most of the inhabitants of the favelas* around the big Brazilian cities are from Northeastern origins and African descendent. The majority are women. Working in precarious jobs, they are the head of extremely poor households. They are also the main victims of endemic gender and police violence in the country. They are the survivors of Canudos.

_Neyde Lantyer, 2019

• The word ‘favela’ has its origins at ‘Morro da Favela’, a mount in the geography of Canudos.