Sophie Barbasch: Obras
Obras
A train is like a ligament. The route almost has a corporeal form. It engraves itself into the landscape. In the absence of some sort of structure to understand things, I look to railroads and highways, the veins of commerce and connection. These are also, paradoxically, stand-ins for their opposite: for being lost, uprooted, on the loose.
When I was little, my Brazilian stepmother introduced me to a new language and culture. I learned Portuguese and traveled to Brazil regularly, wondering if I was an insider or an outsider. At some point, I decided I needed to go to Brazil on my own. I applied for a grant to photograph the Transnordestina, a railroad under construction in the Northeast that ties the desert to the sea. I lived in Fortaleza for a year, traveling throughout Ceará, Piauí, and Pernambuco.
I followed the route of the train like a map, listening to stories about drought, the emergence of labor unions, and corrupt judges; about quilombos and their sacred spaces; about assentamentos and different political regimes. People told me about the first railroad built by the British and how the colonial shadow has shifted and morphed but never quite disappeared; they told me about anthropologists who came to extract and were followed home by ghosts. These stories exist in different times, registers, and translations. They give way to images that traverse the dark space between languages. — Sophie Barbasch
This monograph is comprised of 36 photographs taken along the route of the Transnordestina, a railroad under construction in the Northeast of Brazil that ties the desert to the sea. Traveling throughout Ceará, Piauí, and Pernambuco, Barbasch explored a country in a persistent state of flux. Obras revolves around the notion of suspension, both literal and metaphorical. The photographs are not about documenting from a stable viewpoint so much as about referencing a shifting subjectivity. They grapple with the slippery question of what it means to belong in a place and whether we can actually ever know anything simply by looking.
