CAIPIRA, STUBBORN & ALL TOO HUMAN

They say that after chopping that tobacco, the caipira was driven off the land. Not by the painter. By the late nineteenth century, export-oriented agriculture was already strangling smallholdings. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Monoculturae. So we went looking for the model after the exodus. And found him. In a modest little house, far from Almeida’s tranquility. So much world was bursting in from outside that it stifled us more than the lack of space. Then the scene’s surface tension broke: the man and his ritual were there, intact, as though persisting in the rite were an effective defense. Or resistance. Perhaps a way to regain, at least on the microphysical scale of everyday life, the reins and grace of one’s own life. The record was drawn up.