What ever happened down Rio das Mortes?

Installation: 2-channel video,, 31’42’’, graphic plexiglass print, rubber tires, stenographic machine, archival photography, rubber objects, video 2 min (loop).

Commissioned by TOK curators for Colonial Endurance, Detecting the Algorithm of Violence in Infrastructures exhibition, at Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Museum for architecture, design and digital culture.

Part of the ongoing artistic research project "New Worlders". 2023

A dialogue between a young researcher and her dead explorer aunt, with the two protagonists 100 years apart and so speaking to each other from disparate times.

By Flora Reznik / With: Pinar Karaaslan and Lauren Maxwell / Sound: Jorrit van Rijn / Light: Jorrit van Rijn and Flora Reznik / Camera: Flora Reznik / Make up: Marissa Coster

New Worlders is an artistic research project where historical, field, scientific and testimonial research combine with speculation and fantasy. It takes the form of a dialogue between a young researcher and her dead explorer aunt, with the two protagonists 100 years apart and so speaking to each other from disparate times. The researcher sets out to retrace the steps of her great aunt, Maria Reznik, who in the 1940s left her job as a stenographer (a fast typing technology used to transcribe speech in shorthand, usually in court reports), and became one of the first white women to explore the Southern Amazon. She joined the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, a State initiative known for mapping the interior of Brazil and for “pacifying” the indigenous peoples, which led to decimation of the population and devastation of the environment.

The researcher is guided by the entries in her aunt’s diary, written as a means to process the urgency of the events she had witnessed. She also keeps a hand drawn map of the river Rio das Mortes, with blank patches indicating “virgin land, yet to be penetrated”. In this river of the dead, she hopes to ascertain and examine her aunt’s reasons for partaking in the colonization of this territory.

Through the use of speculative fiction and a revisitation of the classic adventure-explorer narrative, New Worlders replaces the notion of the hero’s conquest of nature with a wide range of voices – both human and non-human, voices that resist being tamed. As the researcher moves deeper into the jungle, she encounters an interspecies alliance between an underground political movement, inheritor of the rubber tappers union from the 1980s, and an endemic fungus that affects rubber trees. This is an epistemological proposition to consider the intelligence of the forest. It also hints towards a solution to the problems posed by the ongoing devastation of the Amazon ecosystem.