Praça da Saudade: camadas de sentimentos soterrados

Abstract

The Cadastral Letter of the City and Arrabaldes de Manáos, of 1895, commissioned by the then governor, Eduardo Ribeiro, presents the floor plan of Manaus and the spaces dedicated to the construction of squares. Among all, only one is named after a feeling, mixed, complex and delicate: the “Praça da Saudade”, opened in 1865 and located in front of the São José cemetery, in the city center. It comes at a very turbulent time for the city, infested by epidemic diseases. Based on the effervescence of such events, this dissertation aims to establish a counter-narrative to the media mirror created by the media, proposing to explore other factors that reveal the complexity of the Square as a communicational ecosystem. For this, the individual and subjective experiences, both of the researcher and of the interviewees, are consolidated as intrinsic factors to the ecosystems webs. Excavated memories, stories and emotions form what we call here overlapping layers. Maria Bernadete Mafra de Andrade's PhD thesis, entitled “Mythical city: a poetics of ruins”, defended at USP / 2002, served as inspiration for this study. Thus, the metaphor overlapping layers that, in addition to the symbolic representation that it entailed, constituted, here, the approach method, a precondition for the understanding and analysis of the research data. For the apprehension of the intrinsic phenomena to the object Praça da Saudade, the methodology anchored in archival research, associated with direct and systematic observation, therefore, participatory, with an impact on the relationships of social subjects who live the daily life of the Square. In the academic field, the construction of the work is in analyzing and interpreting a set of facts captured under the ecosystem look at that space; another proposal, which fits, nowadays, as a counter narrative to the media mirror, since it was proposed, simultaneously, to search stories buried under "cement floors".