Exhibition Villa Bella - Iconographic memory of a beautiful island (Ilhabela 1900-1980)
A crossing in time
For the past 10 years, I’ve dreamed of gathering old photographs of Ilhabela that I knew were preserved as treasures with no known maps. Recently I’ve been groping about until the paths lead me to some of the guardians of these gems; people aged 60, 80 and even 96 who have generously opened their homes, their albums, their boxes, their lives.
Wrapped in their memories, we revisited the plantations in full activity, crossed the channel in canoes by paddle and by “cloth” sail, watched the trade with Santos flourish and then dwindle.
We boarded legendary canoes that transported from goods to newlyweds, guests and even dead people. We woke up in the middle of the night enchanted by the Reis revelers at our doors and windows.
And sailed in São Pedro’s processions, and watched the Congada and got so involved that we even heard the sound of the marimba.
We went here and there on foot and by bicycle, getting off balance in the sometimes sandy stretches of trails between beaches.
We walked many kilometers to get to school everyday. Dropped picaré fishing trawl with the adults. We heard the sound of berrante, the horn, calling them to the sea as the mullet came in.
Young, we got together with friends on the Vila’s pier to play, sing and sometimes dance. Our daily life even ended up on movie screens when, shortly before 1950, the film Caiçara, the first production of Vera Cruz Film Company, was shooted here.
Gradually, we received the first immigrants and also the first vacationers. We saw architecture changing in the face of new demands. We witnessed the arrival of the first automobile on the island and many others when the ferry boat started operating – by then we were knocking on the doors of the 1960s.
Finally, we advanced through the 1970s and continued enjoying Carnival and dyeing with our crepe paper costumes the waters of the channel at the end of Dorothea’s Bath.
So many memories and emotions led us to this journey that the photographs here reveal. They, which have the magical power to cross time, mixing past and future.
All testimonies showed a common point: the love for Ilhabela.
It is this loving gaze that we have launched at Villa Bella/Formosa/Villa Bella da Princesa/Ilhabela since the beginning of the last century, and we come to current times with a certain nostalgia and the confessed wish of having really lived those simple and free times.
We continue our journey, now loaded with a wider vision and new feelings which give us a better understanding of current days and fight for a present and future worthy of this land and its inhabitants, from the original ones to those who one day made this crossing guided by the heart.
Maristela Colucci
The exhibition takes place between Dec 2021 and Feb 2022 at the Ilhabela Art and Culture Foundation (Fundaci), through the Aldir Blanc Law and financed by the Municipal Culture Fund of Ilhabela.
