INTRODUCTION

(Tom Lisboa)

 

It was when I read Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, that I first heard about Maurilia, the city which the traveller is invited to visit while looking at ‘some old postcards that show it as it used to be’. In the author's point of view, Maurilia is a metropolis, perhaps like London, São Paulo or Paris, where viaducts took the place of bandstands and provincialism gave way to the charm of prosperity. Because they have postcards, these cities have in common the possibility of being dreamed, since, as in the book, each sender becomes an inventive narrator like the traveller Marco Polo, and each recipient, a curious and attentive listener like Emperor Kublai Khan.

 

New Maurilias is an experience in which I produced the first postcards for (almost) invisible cities. With a population between 1,400 and 2,500 inhabitants and founded between the 1960s and 1990s, Iguatu, Esperança Nova, Nova Aliança do Ivaí, Guaporema, Mirador, Santa Inês, São Manoel do Paraná, Miraselva, Jardim Olinda, and Santo Antônio do Paraíso are considered the ten smallest municipalities in Paraná. The postcard, in this case, was used both so that each one of these locations can, in the future,  ‘look back with nostalgia at what it was’ as well as to fulfil the imagination of people in other urban centres with illustrated stories from these remote areas of our country.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic often postponed my trips, but they ended up happening between August and November 2020, when the number of cases began to alternate between ‘stable’ and ‘decreasing’ in the region. With schools closed and many individuals isolated in their homes, these towns seemed deserted. The human presence, however, was felt in the well-kept gardens, in the ringing of the church bell, and the always clean streets. My visits usually started at the home of one of the pioneers, people who explored those ‘red earth’ landscapes and saw the asphalt coming with some masonry dwellings. The chat almost always continued at the house of another person who ‘knew that story better’. Thus, gathering fragments scattered at various addresses, I was accessing some of the collective memory of each place. For the production of the photos, the compact size of each municipality helped my exploration, but with the help of local guides (to whom I am immensely grateful), the small town became larger. I was able to explore not only the totality of its streets but also to discover its outskirts bordered by rivers, trails and lakes, as well as to enter photography studios and buildings that had restricted access. In a community where everyone knows each other by name, having contact within this network gave me a feeling of being welcome and facilitated the development of my activities.

 

 

After driving 3.400km, taking approximately six thousand photos, and listening to about fifty hours of interviews, I returned to Curitiba to organise these pieces of information and my memories and translate them onto the pages of this book. Today, from all those places, I remember the red dust that was on my trainers at the end of the day, the taste of coffee already sweetened in the thermos, the houses with bright colours, the countless good days and good afternoons and the ‘May God go with you’ at each farewell. The book encapsulates practically the whole experience by bringing stories, photos, and official postcards from each town. During the launch of this publication, I exercised my Marco Polo side and offered on social media, for the whole world, hundreds of postcards that showed part of what I experienced in my trips. Through this sharing activity, these municipalities not only left their invisibility condition but felt connected with other urban centres and started to occupy a space in the imagination of several Kublai Khans.

 

Finally, together with some residents of these ten municipalities, the official postcard was defined, and a print run of 3,000 units was delivered to each town hall. Since then, they can be considered New Maurilias, and they belong, as well as other fantastic cities, to a great tangle of fantasies: those we can put a stamp on and send to someone.

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