Poetic trajectories: Ethnographic accounts of art, literacies and education from an Amazonian archipelago

Abstract

This article reports ethnographic fieldwork on literacy and community arts. The setting is an arts education project named Tecno Barca working in the Bailique Archipelago, a cluster of small islands and riverside communities, situated within the Amazon River (Amapá, Brazil). It begins with a theoretical overview of ethnography, ethnographic perspectives on literacies, critical understandings of creativity, as well as biographical, semiotic and textual trajectories. These approaches offer a counterpoint to deficit, deterministic and non-dynamic understandings of literacy. Following theory, I survey geographical and social aspects of Tecno Barca's place, project and people, as well as locating my fieldwork there during two editions spanning 10 years from 2014 to 2024. The rest of the article is divided into two main sections. First, in Creative Trajectories, I focus on ways everyday literacies, including writing and photography, become interacted with and developed on through Tecno Barca workshops. Tracing text and semiotic trajectories through the project illustrates a cline or spectrum, connecting everyday creativity into more deliberative and sustained artistic and poetic practices. Secondly, Island Connections concerns communication and common ground established between people from distant locations, via storytelling and poetry. The initial example discusses migrating teachers, uses of storytelling in education, and how stories are transformed through art. Afterwards, I recount a poetry reading project set up between a group of young artists from the Bailique Archipelago and literature students from the University of London. Conclusions stress the value of ethnographic and multimodal perspectives during periods of social and technological change; dynamic and hopeful understandings of literacies; ethics of love within education; as well as broad creative and poetic viewpoints on everyday life.