The Capybaras of Ipaussu
For many, it’s no surprise that Capybaras are going through a cult moment on the internet, from the memes celebrating chill vibes and interspecies harmony (minus that one pelican ofc), to the Facebook group where its almost 50,000 members “all pretend to be capybaras.” Yet like all internet phenomena there is an ultimate and inevitable flattening of the real. In the case of internet Capycore, these semiaquatic macro-rodents indigenous to Latin America lose their local contexts and histories in order to become a lowkey meme god often depicted by domesticated Capys in nonnative environments like Japanese Zoos and LA mansions. Ofc this is just the tendency of globalized networked media in vectorialist global north platforms, and ofc All Capys Are Beautiful, but at the end of the day there are countless native Capys in South America and Panama losing their habitats, living in urbanized areas, and going through real ish everyday and their stories deserve to be told as well.
The average Brazilian in rural Sao Paulo is surprised to hear that Capybaras are popular on the internet. For many of them, capybaras are pests that invade crops, tasty game to hunt, or at worst, a public health risk. Capybaras, especially young ones, can harbor ticks that carry R. rickettsii, a bacteria that causes Febre Maculosa, a deadly disease also known as Brazilian Spotted Fever.
As Capybaras witness the decimation of their native wetland habitats caused by overdevelopment and climate change, they increasingly migrate closer to humans, sometimes living in urban environments like the Pullman Hotel lake outside Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo, or like the municipal lake in the center of the park in Ipaussu, a rural town of 15,000 near the border of São Paulo State and Paraná. Capys have a gregarious nature that makes them highly adaptable to human settings. Over time, the Capybaras of Ipaussu helped turn the municipal lake into a local tourist attraction, but as is often the case of interactions with wildlife and urbanized life, there are unintended consequences on unseen scales.
Between January 2019 and May 2020, Four people in Ipaussu died of Brazilian Spotted Fever. Two of them were children and one of them was fifteen. Once the source of the disease was eventually traced back to the Capybaras living in the municipal lake, locals decided they have had enough. Following the wake of eight-year-old Haroldo Marcondes, dozens of Ipaussu residents marched in the streets protesting the Capybaras and demanding their removal. The town mayor agreed with them.
The fate of the Capybaras was sealed, but Brazilian environmental bureaucracy takes its time. In March 2021, the Capys were herded away from the municipal lake and corralled at a nearby pasture. They have been tagged by health officials and will be tested for exposure to R. rickettsii. Capybaras that turn out to be potential vectors for Brazilian Spotted Fever will be euthanized while the rest will be sterilized and allowed to live out their lives in their new enclosure. Because they are considered to be a contaminated population, disease prevention protocols prevent them from being reintroduced into the wild. The Anthropocene bursts through at every scale, local and microscopic. This is not unique to the region, the same lake in Ipaussu had a massive fish die-off event in December 2020 that was attributed to oxygen deprivation and low water levels.
"The Capybaras of Ipaussu" is a Brazilian story told with glitched low-resolution photographs as a way to question what Hito Steyerl refers to as 'the contemporary hierarchy of images.' In a globalized economy, this tech hierarchy that privileges high-resolution imagery distributed on U.S. and European platforms ultimately limits which stories from the Global South are considered worthy to be told and seen. As a series intrinsically tied to this 'alternative economy of images,' every photograph is presented in databent wavelet-compression based image formats that have become obsolete. While wavelet compression formats are hardly used today, they were developed in the 1990s-2010s as an alternative to the Discrete Cosine Transfer (DCT) algorithms used in JPEG image compression. This series includes images in WIC (J-Wavelet Image Codec), JPM (JPEG2000 compound Image), IWC (WaveL Bitmap Format), and WLM (CompW Bitmap File) formats. The latter being a rare format that was developed and interred in Brazil much like the capybaras in these works. Some images were sourced from screenshots of a Debate article: "Ipaussu declares 'war' against the capybaras of the municipal lake". The Capybara portraits were designed in a way to celebrate their collective and individual identities as social, matriarchal, alloparental creatures.