Description:

At the start of the twentieth century, Brazilian military officer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958) led what became known as the Rondon Commission in a massive undertaking: the building of telegraph lines connecting the Amazon region and its indigenous peoples with the country’s coastal cities. This task of stringing together the nation through telegraph lines sought to forge a unified community of “Brazilians” in the new Republic. Visual technology, both photography and film, was part of this political endeavor, and it was used to consolidate and expand the state’s order and progress in the tropical backlands. This talk will examine the Rondon Commission’s visual archive, exploring ways in which it articulated and responded to the Republic’s “techno-politics,” defined by Timothy Mitchell as an operation of political rule via the technological workings of infrastructures. It argues that while photography and film were part of the same techno-material as the telegraph, their production and reception often escaped the progressive order or the nation.