Nas tramas do porto-paredão: lazer, visualidades e trabalho na praia do Porto da Barra (Salvador, BA)

Abstract

The beach of Porto da Barra is considered a postcard of the city of Salvador, in Bahia. As an urban beach and an important tourist destination, it is configured as a meeting place for diverse actors and heterogeneous groups. Located in the middle-class neighborhood of Barra, the beach is marked by the overlap between leisure and labor, bringing together people and groups from different social classes, ethnic-racial backgrounds, and spatial origins, who “make” the beach through conflicts, negotiations, and encounters. This dissertation, by paying attention to this particular process of making, seeks to follow the “ways of making the beach” at Porto da Barra, with a focus on what is referred to as Porto-Paredão. The choice of this delimitation stems from the presence of suburban actors and groups—often considered invaders—who frequent the beach on weekends, generating controversies around their ways of occupying and experiencing the space. Understanding the beach as a unique space-time of articulation between human and non-human agents in Salvador, the research aims to shed light on the compositional strategies of the Porto-Paredão. It involves thinking through a chain of processes and agencies mobilized in the production of this space, attending to the diversity of people (bathers, clients, stall owners, street vendors, fishers), artifacts, sounds, trajectories, as well as the discourses involved in the manipulation of materials, the strip of sand, forms of enjoyment, corporealities, and performances. This ethnography aims to bring forth a particular intelligibility that underlies the making of Porto da Barra, especially on the days of Porto-Paredão, interwoven with the agencies of the actors and a sociability articulated as a network—composed of relationships, practices, and materials—that traverses the boundaries between leisure and labor. Photographic recording is here mobilized as part of the ethnographic construction itself, enabling a listening to the images—in other words, a sensitive tuning of the researcher with other affective frequencies. Through this exercise, the photographs of Porto da Barra and Porto-Paredão were created, taking into account the encounters, the fissures, and the gaps that emerged from them. With photography, the second objective is to enhance the different perspectives and agencies of labor and leisure on the beach, understanding it more as a methodology of evocation—of what words cannot reach—and as a medium of ethnographic mediation, rather than as a mere tool of documentation. Photography operates as an agent for the emergence of a particular Porto da Barra, one that is realized in the gestures of those photographed and in their images before the camera, promoting a relational encounter.