PORTRAITS IN BLACK AND WHITE: social dynamics in the Ponta Verde neighborhood and the (de)construction of the Maceió postcard
postcard.
This work is about the seafront of the Ponta Verde district, a which works as a tourist shrine in Maceió. It is a scenario whose image is extremely publicized, and it is almost exclusively through it that the postcard of the capital, and its current tourist identity, is built and sold within the National market. However, it is important to observe the peculiarities of the dynamics daily life of the place, which works as a showcase space for the city – a stage for conflicts, religious and cultural traditions. Space of multiple social divisions, repressions, prejudices and contestations – where peripheral bodies are unwelcome and their right at leisure is guarded. It is a space that fragments into new pieces and asserts itself from the daily diversity of its uses, characters and subversions – characteristics whose entirety of the postcard, harmonic and paradisiacal, chooses to “hide”. Therefore, through an interdisciplinary research that permeates the fields of visual anthropology, of ethnography and urbanism, it is intended to understand the construction of the current portrait of Maceió, searching within its history and its different postcards commercialized over the decades, the motivations that imply the way of seeing and portray the city of today. Thus, complemented by a field research stage, one must obtain a sensitive and comprehensive look at Ponta Verde, which escapes its fabricated image and welcome the micro-spaces that the place produces. look that sees the voids, gaps and fissures in this initially homogeneous image – and which, in this way, rebuild this mediatized portrait, returning another product, a new card postcard.