WHAT IS IT?
O Mármore e A Murta (The Marble and The Myrtle) is a visual investigation of the forgotten pre-colonial indigenous trails that connected South-American peoples across the continent, from Brazil to Peru. The goal is to produce images of these landscapes in their current state and confront them with their largely unknown history.
The project strives to reconstruct the “Peabiru Trail”, a pre-colonial network of footpaths used by the indigenous Guarani population in their migrations between what is now Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. The existence of these paths shatters the traditional colonial views of South America. Through research of history, archeology and anthropology we are working to map out the location of the forgotten trail to then travel across its extension documenting what exists there today in light of its own buried past.
A five-day trial excursion has already taken place between São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, and São Vicente, a nearby coastal town and the oldest in the country. The undertaking was documented in a photographic diary. The end goal is an expedition from Brazil to the Bolivian Andes where the Peabiru Trail connected to the Imperial Roads of the Incas, 3000 miles away.
WHO IS IT?
The Marble and The Myrtle was created by Gui Marcondes. The filmmaker and photographer lives and works in New York, USA and São Paulo, Brazil. He has a bachelor degree in Architecture and City Planning, started his career as an illustrator and later migrated to animation and photography. In 2020 “The Marble and The Myrtle” was accepted at the Magnum Photos development workshop with photographer Moises Saman and Paul Moakley, editor of special projects for TIME Magazine. In 2018 he was one of ten photographers selected for the workshop of renowned photographers Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb in New York. GIRA, his annual photobook series published since 2017 is part of the permanent collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles Library in São Paulo.
Marcondes has twenty years of experience as a filmmaker and his short-films were selected to countless international festivals. His most famous film Tyger (2006), was chosen as one of the one hundred most important animations in Brazilian history in 2018. The film won over twenty awards around the world and it is still regularly programmed in festival screenings. He is currently the Creative Diretor at studio Lobo in NYC.
In 2013 Marcondes was a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he spent two weeks conducting a workshop on Narrative Spaces in Film and Games. Since that year he is a permanent member of the jury in the MIT Creative Arts Competition for startups merging technology and the arts. Marcondes is also an adjunct professor at Feinstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.
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