With a very attentive audience, composed by researchers from the Urban Institute, Junia had the pleasure to have their considerations upon the project, which is still in its early stage, as it will last until June 2026.
The research project, entitled “Urban-Nature Archives: Spatial Practices of Futurity in Brazilian Amazonia”, proposes to open up a discussion on Brazilian urbanization processes through visual methodologies, departing from a specific collection that registers various transformations in the Brazilian Amazon frontier in the 1980s and early 1990s. The collection chosen as the object of study includes slides, VHS films and field notebooks from the personal collection of Roberto Luís Monte-Mór, Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), who authored the concept of “extended urbanisation” in the late 1980s, while working with Edward Soja as his PhD supervisor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, that concept converged with another one that became a very important one in the field, which is that of planetary urbanization, as proposed by Neil Brener in Implosions/ Explosions.
For this presentation Junia focused on the challenges put forward by the methodology of the research, considering the specificity of sensory and visual methods on urban studies, aiming to historicize certain socio-spatial transformations and the struggles derived from them, without losing the possibility of imagining the future, and also the past otherwise. She presented how she has organized the archive so far, with the help of Roberto Monte-Mor himself and of the undergraduate student Mariana Modesto, following a long process of selecting, digitizing and cataloging. Underpinning that work there is a discussion on the authority of the archive and the archival procedures. Junia pointed out that this process made it possible to interact with the research interlocutors in order to collectively build other ways of seeing the photographs from the 1980s today.
Some of the questions that the audience raised dealt with the technology of photography, the adequacy or inadequacy of certain terms, such as nature, forest, city, urban, the political engagement of the work on study, and the rural dimension of the area under study. Also some important questions concerned sensory methodologies and the challenge of translating its outputs into text and articles. Some degree of knowledge will more or less always remain opaque to the dominant written language of Academia and it might be that sensory methodologies only make it more evident.