(text by Renata Meirelles)

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a strong desire to travel all over Brazil, to get to know its diverse realities firsthand. When I’d travel with my parents, my eyes fixated on the landscape passing by, and I’d imagine myself visiting each little house on the side of the highway. I’d invent names and destinies for those kids with barefoot bodies whose eyes gazed into the wind, and for those old folks with crooked canes who spent hours on crooked benches in the shade of jacaranda trees.

Without really wanting to, I grew up. But that meant I could travel in my own car to knock on the doors of the lives of these people that I so wanted to meet. I remember the boys in Canoa Quebrada, Ceará, whose flip-flop rafts were identical to the real rafts used by their parents. Or the boys who worked making charcoal in Mato Grosso; at the end of the day they would wash the soot off their bodies at the local stream, and trade it for clay while making the most fantastic clay figurines. Or the Xavante Indian kids, from the savanah of Mato Grosso, whose stilts were one-piece branches, carefully chosen and cut right off the trunk. Or Sr. Zico from Colina, São Paulo, who chased cats out of his bodega while teaching me a vast repertory of toys from his childhood, all made from industrial leftovers. Or the kids on the grass fields in front of the churches in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais; their hands clasped plastic bags full of marbles, and between their ears and lips shot code words decipherable only by those who really know how to play. These and so many more stories united with those invented in my childhood.

The childhoods and games in each place I passed were what always attracted me the most. Since 1991, I’ve been discovering that play and children’s culture is on my road to truly becoming an adult. I strategize to stay close to kids but I take care not to over-institutionalize my work. In 1999, I took a vacation to some regions of the Amazon and my eyes fixated on the childhood at the river’s edge, a childhood born into those tall houses on stilts.

I came home resolute on creating a project that would allow for a better understanding of the children’s culture in this region so vast and liquid. First, I needed a partner who could accompany me and be responsible for documenting everything in video. And this partnership couldn’t have worked out better: day after day David Reeks revealed that behind his blue-green eyes, there lived a sweet boy whose firm hands held in a camera childhood just the way it is. With everything so full of passion, destiny couldn’t have been any different: we married at the end of the trajectory.

This project could not have happened without the help of relatives and friends who never doubted the magnitude of our wishes.

Support and partnerships started to arise with NGO’s and a variety of other institutions that work with riverside and indigenous communities in the Amazon (see “acknowledgements”). These were our true “trailblazers”: people who open paths in the deep forest, shortening distances from one place to another.

So that’s how BIRA was born.