Dádiva em cena: uma opereta sobre joias de família

Abstract

Family jewelry is not synonymous for jewelry. This thing - which can and cannot be made of noble metals and gems - is only related to “family" in social processes, that is, by getting entangled in ancestors and passed on as an inheritance. Accompanied by narratives, it becomes a point of connection for experiences and trajectories between the living, the dead and those who were not even born yet. Chronicles and performances accompany its movements and allow us to access practices and emotions received and bequeathed among generations.

The allegory that Fabricio Barreto (photos) and Aline Lopes Rochedo (text) compose in the imaginary narrative presented here emerges from an ethnography on transmission of family jewels, a research that will result in the Rochedo’s dissertation in 2020. In theoretical terms, the author departs from Marcel Mauss's The Gift, published in 1925 and which still inspires reflections today. Rochedo intends to identify practices and dynamics involved in on-lending of family jewels, things to which values are attributed beyond market. She also tries to understand what these processes reveal about collective life, observing how subjects experience stories and institutions in which relationships exist, contemplating symbolic markers of gender and class.

This essay is a partial construction of realities expressed by the scenographer Andrea Mazza Terra, a resident of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. Although there are in her dissertation more than 40 cases of generational transfers of family jewels, Rochedo highlights Andrea’s words for the richness of her speech on her family. The research began with interviews, informal conversations and observation held at Andrea's house between February and April 2018, when she exposed the Baroness bracelet, a family jewel that initially was a wedding gift from the Baron of Santa Tecla to the future wife, Amelia, grandmother of her great-grandmother.

Rochedo got together with Andrea in May 2018 along with Barreto to photograph her interacting with her family jewel, and the experience shed new light on possibilities of the gift. But the outcome of this improvised and unpredictable script was only possible thanks to Raphael Scholl, a common friend who introduced Andrea to Rochedo and took care of the costumes for the shooting. Barreto and Rochedo constructed the narrative of images in an attempt to mix voices and perceptions in the composition of a scenic experience carried out by Andrea with the help of Raphael and the stylist Maurício Guidotti.

The photos were taken in May 2018, in the tired and stained-glassed Tiffany-studded house where the interlocutor was born and resides. In this very familiar stage inherited from her maternal grandparents, Andrea composed her operetta on the gold and diamond bracelet made in Paris in the XIX century. The adornment that witnessed the splendor and decadence of the Pelotas’ charque economy in the 1920s connects Andrea to five generations of women, from the baroness of Santa Tecla to her grandmother, Nóris, from whom she received the gift. It also keeps her handcuffed to the family's past. The chronicle updated and critical of the cruelties committed against captives by the barons of the charque is added the pendant that was transmitted to her by Nóris during his lifetime. The interlocutor watches in the box of low gold and high esteem the matriarch, deceased in the early 2000s: “If I am what I am, if I am as I am, it is all my grandmother’s. I was raised by her, and the conscience, she gave it to me. [...] Because the history of slavery was always denied, and it was created another story, that one about light slavery”.

Credits:

Author:Aline Lopes Rochedo (PPGAS/UFRGS).

Photos:Fabricio Barreto (Navisual/UFRGS)

Direction, Image Editing:Aline Lopes Rochedo e Fabricio Barreto

Text: Aline Lopes Rochedo

Camera:Canon EOS 6D, lente Canon 24-70 2.8

Records:4 de maio de 2018

Support:O presente trabalho foi realizado com apoio da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (Capes) - Código de Financiamento 001 e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social da UFRGS.