ÎlE BRÈSIL
return to altamira
walls|THE Amazon
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my body is political
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CREATING DESERTS
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ABOUT
On the margins of the work I devoted to the city of Altamira and its surrounding region, I was struck by the sheer number of walls with no apparent function. In a part of Brazil where the question of land ownership—and appropriation—has always been central, and helps explain a persistent, endemic violence, where the only law that truly prevails is that of the strongest, these walls say a great deal about a culture, a state of mind.
A wall, in the conventional sense, defines a plot of land, a property. But this is not the case in the Brazilian Amazon. Here, walls emerge—small or large, intact or crumbling, straight or built at right angles—and serve no purpose in the landscape other than to exist. Useless walls in the middle of nowhere. The recurrence of this sight, and its incongruity in Brazil, a country where I have lived and worked for fifteen years, led me to document this singular phenomenon.