virar mar / becoming sea by Philipp Hartmann and Danilo Carvalho invites us to navigate the depths of the power of imagination, to traverse flooded marshlands, deserts, continents, and perhaps an ocean. An essay about water and its impossibility, an existential meditation.
To think of that which is barren and that which is fruitful, to think the earth and the stream of a river, to think the men and women who have lived in these landscapes that are as old as millennia, like northeastern Brazil, land of prophets and miracles. Indeed, perhaps such a religiosity, such a mystical fervor is rooted in the mysteries and the aridity of the highlands, in the relentless dryness of this part of Brazil. To wait for the miracle means to wait for rain, to wait for the word, for the resurrection, for nourishment, music, a comet, for fertility and for desire.
The last image is powerful, we see two people in a boat in a European garden, a few plants have grown inside the boat that seems to be an abandoned relic of the past, without direction or destiny.
(Translated by Daniel H. Wild)