Do rio ao mar – Rio Paraíba vivo! / From the river to the sea – Paraíba river lives! 

On March 16, 2024, Grupo Erosão presented “Do rio ao mar – Rio Paraíba vivo!” Atafona Point, São João da Barra, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

In 2019 the main estuary of the Rio Paraíba do Sul at the Atlantic Ocean showed signs of closing and today it is completely closed; a strip of sand, more than 200 meters wide, separates the former exit of the river to the sea and joins the old Island of Coexistence (Ilha da Convivência) with Atafona. As environmental changes continue and the outlet that separates the Island of Pessanha from the continent closes, the river will be dead and the entire local fishing community at Atafona will be severely affected.

For this activation, Grupo Erosão collected about 250 meters of torn and discarded fishing nets, also known as “ghost nets,” that can be fatal to marine animals when thrown into the sea. They stretched these nets, recreating the old path that the river made to meet the sea. During the action, a small paper maché boat created by set designer Rafael Sánchez navigated this symbolic river of fishing nets. To close, we created a spiral shape with the nets, a symbol of. among other things, transformation and change, and placed our paper boat in the center of the spiral.

Participants included of a group of about 50 people including members of the Cícero Guedes settlement of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST), theater and performance students from universities in Rio de Janeiro, people from the local community of Atafona, and the members of Grupo Erosão and its collaborators. 

Grupo Erosão, directed by Fernando Codeço, Hemispheric Encounters Postdoctoral Fellow, and the cultural production company CasaDuna, led by Codeço and philosopher Dr. Julia Naidin, have been working on “Do rio ao mar – Rio Paraíba vivo!” as part of “A Convivencia é uma Ilha” / “Coexistence is an Island,” a process-based and transdisciplinary performative research project that uses theater, performance, social museology, and environmental art to create a performative collage of fragments made up of the stories of people whose territories have been threatened either by neo-extractive processes and/or as a result of environmental changes. GrupoErosão bases “A Convivencia é uma Ilha” / “Coexistence is an Island” on real life stories and the archival and interview collections gathered by CasaDuna and the Evictions Museum (Museu das Remoções) of Vila Autódromo in the western zone of Rio de Janeiro.

“A Convivencia é uma Ilha” / “Coexistence is an Island” by Grupo Erosão, directed by Fernando Codeço, and produced by CasaDuna, will premiere in June 2024 at Teatro de Bolso Procópio Ferreira in Campos dos Goytacazes. The show will be both a video installation and a live performance. 

The project is funded by the Federal Law Paulo Gustavo – “Support for Theater – Evoé RJ” award from the State Secretariat for Culture and Creative Economy of the State of Rio de Janeiro and supported by Codeço’s post-doctoral research with Hemispheric Encounters and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).