This zine brings together images captured by Google Street View along the entire route of the Unidos da Tijuca samba school parade during the 2015 Carnival in Marquês de Sapucaí, Rio de Janeiro. That year’s theme, Um encontro marcado no tempo (A rendezvous marked in time), paid tribute to carnival designer Clóvis Bornay. Here, however, Carnival does not appear as a spectacle or an organised celebration. What we see is a party captured by a system that does not recognise choreography, narrative or festive time. Sapucaí is recorded as a road, infrastructure, route. A path to be mapped. Bodies in motion, floats and crowds are fragmented by an automated, intermittent vision, incapable of keeping up with the temporality of Carnival. What should be continuous appears in glitches, jumps and interruptions. Excess becomes noise. The images do not document the parade; they highlight the limitations of a device designed for empty streets, not for bodies in celebration. In this displacement, Carnival is reduced to data, a route, an operational record. There is no choice of framing, no aesthetic intention, only capture. The gaze does not participate, does not interpret, does not celebrate. It operates. The parade ends up becoming an involuntary choreography between popular celebration and mapping technology, revealing how even a collective, local and ephemeral ritual can be absorbed by global recording systems. This zine observes what happens when Carnival is seen through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to party.
13x20cm, 84pp., saddle-stitched binding. Shipping worldwide.
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