Carreiros: memories in motion
Some memories remain tucked away. Others live on only because someone sets them in motion again.
Every year, ox carts return to the streets of Trindade. With them come the carreiros, the ox-cart drivers, the oxen, the spectators and those who return to witness a tradition that is part of the city's memory and cultural life.
This exhibition seeks to show more than the procession.
Through faces, bodies, animals, gestures and details, these photographs draw closer to what happens within and around the passing procession. A glance. A step. A guiding hand. An animal's strength. People waiting. Others walking alongside.
These are fragments of a tradition that exists beyond sweeping views or the moment the carts move forward. It also lives in small, repeated gestures, in knowledge gained through practice, in objects worn by use and in the relationships among those who remain part of this gathering.
The images gathered in Carreiros: memories in motion were made over different years. Rather than reconstructing a procession chronologically, they form a narrative about presence, continuity and transformation.
Time passes. People change. So do the paths we follow.
But something carries on.
The oxen move forward.
The carreiros guide them.
The spectators follow.
And as long as someone keeps guiding, watching, remembering and looking again, memory will keep finding a way forward.