Painting with “Tauá” at the Village of Coqueiros, Brazil: Possible Approaches Between Art and Chemistry in the “BTS Project” [Pintando com o Tauá na Comunidade de Coqueiros: Possíveis Aproxima es entre Arte e Química no “Projeto BTS”]

The construction of a 13 km long bridge has been announced to be built, in a straight line, connecting the city of Salvador to the Itaparica Island, located in the Todos os Santos Bay (BTS). What about the communities that live around the bay? What do people think? Were they inquired about it? Considering the large cultural diversity of the communities located in the region, the research group MAMETO CNPq, composed of researcher artists and graduate students of the Fine Arts School of the Federal University of Bahia, designed a sub-project entitled “BTS Patchwork” as a part of a multi-disciplinary research program known as BTS Project. Aiming to combine nature and art, the group selected 5 communities that presented unique landscape characteristics: Baiacu, Itaparica, Matarandiba, Coqueiros and Maré Island. A question was formulated and presented to the communities to be answered through visual images: What kind of bridge would you like to build? At each location where the group worked, various members of the local community used pieces of a cloth measuring 1.20 m x 1.00 m and environment raw materials, locally extracted, to propose their own imaginary bridges. At each location, urgent needs should be understood before the bridge is built. This article is based upon the research carried out during an art action carried out in Coqueiros (called Port IV ), where the land contains tauá, a clay that was used as pigment in the creation of parts of the big “BTS Patchwork”. This intervention allowed the approximation between Art and Chemistry, through elemental analysis by Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX).