Student Work
Final document’s front cover
Printed card file of project’s media collection
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Title
Overseeing Amazonia: Environmental Media of Brazilian Grounds
Project Description
In 1988 a new Brazilian constitution reset public representations of Amazonia. For centuries colonial expansionist discourses portrayed the forest as a “demographic void.” This new democratic regime acknowledged cultural and ontological differences within national territory for the first time. Simultaneously, the rise of climatic concerns, leading to recurrent images of forest fires in news coverage, increased widespread concern for protecting the rainforest. Although these changes allowed the amplification of evidence of social and environmental violence in the region and opened space for broad public mobilization to protect it, deforestation records have reached unprecedented levels over the last few years. To tackle this apparent contradiction, this project takes Amazonia’s representations as a central matter of concern. Due to its vastness, cartography has been a dominant point of view for guiding planning and conservation in the region. These distanced maps unify the rainforest as a single observable, useful and closed object. Looking at environmental media helps us to better understand how ‘from above’ representations assist in the imposition of violent developmental plans for the region, but also helps us to see how there is no one unmediated view from below to counter it. Instead, the media collection traces a sectional cartography that suggests possible ways to cut through the binary division via an erratic scalar comprehension of Amazonia. The collection of representations is gathered in a web archive that favors repetition and partiality rather than completeness. Among statues that celebrate gold mining, maps that demarcate territories to protect and extract, and atmospheric representations in general circulation models, the project thinks about how the forest shapes and is shaped by its media. And, if images can work to simplify the crisis in Amazonia as a polarized clash between protectors and invaders, this project asks how they can be retooled to imagine other futures for Brazilian hinterlands.
