Memories of the Interior Sea: landscapes, imaginary and science

Mário Cezar Silva Leite (Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso – Cuiabá / Brasilien)

Email: mcsl@terra.com.br

ABSTRACT:

From several and different discourses elaborated on the existence of an interior sea – in in the “out of shore” country region of Brazil – I analyze in what ways different authors elaborated to that region the image of a “natural” space where scientific thought and poetic imagination get together, crossing and inter-crossing different landscapes. About these interior seas – from the geologic theories, the Spanish travelers-chronic-writers Los Xarayés Lagoon to the anthropologists and filmmakers’ Sea of Xaraés – I detect the imaginary construction of a space, and its memory, dived in dispersed and not always confluent ideas. Each discourse that has accessed the past of that region, besides being apparently settled on the same image of an interior sea, refers itself to different images, spaces, pasts and seas. In the end of this diving, I demonstrate that more than being dispersed, that sea has probably never existed… Despite, of course, to have always existed…