Uma história visual da luta pela terra : Porto Alegre, Praça da Matriz, 1990

Abstract

This research aimed to understand the construction of the visual memory of the event of the struggle for land that took place in Praça da Matriz, in the city of Porto Alegre, on August 8, 1990. To do so, we sought to build series based on the analysis and interpretation of how the event was constructed, given to see and conveyed by the major regional and national commercial press. In dialogue, a series of eighty-six photographs from different institutional and private collections, entitled SINDJORS series, were analyzed. The dissertation was structured in five chapters. The first chapter is configured in the introduction, where the theoretical basis of the dissertation is presented, based on the concepts of journalistic field (Bourdieu), visuals (Menezes), public photography (Mauad), memory (Candau) and survival (Didi-Huberman). In the second chapter, an immersion was carried out in the context of the construction of the photograph produced in Brazil between the 1960s and 1990s. Emphasis was placed on the professional career of photographers, whose production of images is linked to the land issue. This route was traced to the photographers of the SINDJORS series. Then, aspects of the historical course of the rural social movements in Rio Grande do Sul (Harres), (Eckert) were presented. It was analyzed how the construction of the photographic practices (Mauad) of these professionals, dedicated to the production of images on the question of land, is related, in some aspects, to the very construction of the struggle for land. In chapters three and four, considering the pressures of the market (economic capital) and political on the field of journalism, we identified some strategies adopted by the commercial communication vehicles to report the event, which can be summarized in these points: criminalize the MST act; disqualify the political action, directing the agenda for the death of the soldier Valdeci de Abreu and decontextualizing the history of the struggle for land; and construct the narratives from the idea of “conflict”. Finally, it was observed that the idea of "confrontation" was present in the relationship between the photographs and the text published in the periodicals. The photographs published in the newspapers analyzed complain of a report of denunciation of police violence, in opposition to the text that tends to value the action of the military police. In chapter five, the series of images of SINDJORS was analyzed, identifying their patterns and survivals, as well as the editions of the labor union newspapers (SINJORS and Sindibancários) and of the newspaper Sem Terra (MST). It was found that the discursive elaboration of the newspaper "Sem Terra” has similarities with the versions reported by the Jornal do SINDJORS and O Bancário. However, in "Sem Terra", there is an accentuation on the concern to insert the event of Praça da Matriz in the prism of the historical course of the struggle for land in Brazil, highlighting the violent scenario led by the governments to deal with the land issue. It can be said that the construction of the visual memories of the event are shaped by the dispute between the versions of the journalistic text, condensed in repetition and reproduction, and the visualities of photographs, based on the tension between resistance and repression, and in the survivals of images of other temporalities.