Revisiting Amazonian archives through decolonial lenses reveals colonial urbanism’s hidden patterns and erasures
Original framing: “What Amazonian photographs reveal when we look again, and together” — Phys.org
The Amazon’s 20th-century frontier expansion mirrors earlier colonial cycles, from the rubber boom’s violent labor regimes to the dictatorship’s 'integrate or perish' doctrine. Monte-Mór’s work aligns with mid-century modernist planners like Lúcio Costa, who designed Brasília as a symbol of Brazil’s 'progress' while displacing Indigenous groups. The paper’s temporal focus on the 1970s–90s ignores how these archives were later weaponized by agribusiness lobbies to lobby for deregulation, showing how 'development' narratives persist across regimes.
Monte-Mór’s photographs are not just relics of a bygone era but active participants in the Amazon’s ongoing colonial project, where the camera’s lens became a tool for the state to justify the violent expansion of 'extended urbanism.
' The paper’s call to 'look again' with 'different people in the room' is a start, but without ceding epistemic authority to Indigenous and peasant communities, it risks reproducing the very erasures it claims to interrogate. Historically, this model mirrors the *rubber boom*’s exploitation and the *dictatorship’s* 'integrate or perish' doctrine, where development narratives were weaponized to displace millions. The solution lies in dismantling the archival power structures that legitimize these narratives—through co-curation, legal redress, and Indigenous-led documentation—while recognizing that the Amazon’s future depends on who controls its story. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the absurdity of treating the forest as a blank slate for human design is exposed when the camera is handed to those who have always known it as kin.