XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Rondônia on (re)view: Retrieving Images of an Unresolved Colonial Past

• In Event: Places in Brazilian Studies

Abstract

In 1909, photographer Dana Merrill was commissioned by a U.S. Railway Company to document a neocolonial engineering feat in Latin America: the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. Merrill’s images showcased this ambitious enterprise intended to expand corporate capitalism in the Western Amazon rainforest, inscribing a promise of modernization in the "land of the rubber-gum tree." In 2012, almost a century later, I started working with this photographic archive, interrogating the fabrication of colonial representations, the construction of imaginaries and the writings of History. Retrieving these images and the multiple histories embodied within helps recognize their possibilities to inquiring futures. Initially, this research process — existing in the intersection of an analysis of photographic archive and the creation of collaborative pedagogical projects — examined the collections looking particularly at traces of the invisible and the archive’s silences and omissions. Then, the photographic documents were confronted to films made in the state of Rondônia during the XX century. The aftermath of this confrontation helps scrutinize a more hemispheric take on colonial image critique and recognize the violence of the drastic man-made environmental alterations in this region and its cultural implications. My talk will explore how those images and the eternal discourses towards development, together, assembled in a work of montage, announces ways to interrupt the collective imaginary on environmental and political issues (land dispute, destruction of habitats, deforestation, colonization).

Author

• Naara Fontinele dos Santos, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3