WRITING
Projeto RADAM (Radar da Amazônia) Map, 1972
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
“It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory … and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours.”
Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard
OMNIA IN LOCUS SUIS DISPOSITA
Rivers wind through the terrain in an Earth transformed into an eerie lunar landscape. Impenetrable forest canopies have lost all resemblance to nature, seemingly frozen in crystalline stasis. Veins and topography merge in the epidermal azure; none are marked bar the rivers and the lone roadway with neither end nor beginning.
The cartographic metamorphosis is the result of a mosaic picture generated by electromagnetic waves reflected from the dense jungle canopy. Captured by a Caravelle airplane, the radar extremities attached to the aircraft capture an area of 27.5 kilometers per pass. These strips of Earth, exposed to infrared film, aligned, and sutured together create the composite Brazilian Amazon. Each master copy is alchemically transferred via diazonium salt to prepare the image for distribution to mining and logging companies—methodologically identical to architects transferring plans to blueprints. The map is an operational image, the blue a chromatic signifier of potentiality. The Amazon is now an excavation site.
Physical seams betray the map’s claim to a continuous, totalizing vision. Where the individual 27.5-kilometer swaths meet, slight misalignments in the topography expose the artificiality of the composite. The image is not a contiguous landscape but a mechanized patchwork held together by the external logic of the coordinate system. The grid is not a neutral mathematical abstraction superimposed over a pre-existing reality; rather, the grid is the foundational technology that produces the very concept of being in one’s place. The reticular overlay framing the RADAM mosaic—the strict geometric demarcation of latitude and longitude along the map's borders—does not merely describe the Amazon. It enacts a conceptual enclosure, forcing the chaotic, non-Euclidean hydrology of the basin into an administrative architecture.
The radar sensor operates as the primary mechanism of this spatial filtration. Bombarding the earth in the X-band microwave frequency, the GEMS-1000 system records only surface roughness and reflectivity. It registers the topographic folds and the volumetric density of the timber with extreme precision, but remains structurally blind to the organic architecture of indigenous existence. The organic materials of local habitation do not return a distinct radar cross-section against the dense canopy; they are absorbed into the electromagnetic static. Consequently, the technical limitations of the sensor execute a profound epistemological violence: filtering out the material evidence of human history while technologically confirming the military dictatorship’s ideological premise of a vazio demográfico, or demographic void. Erasure of the indigenous population is not an accidental byproduct of the medium, but the direct result of its operational parameters.
We encounter the object, therefore, as a document of premeditated spatial organization. The uniform cyan wash of the diazo print flattens the multidimensional, temporal ecology of the rainforest into a two-dimensional plane of static resources. Within this framework, the lone roadway noted in the topography functions not as a path of transit, but as a physical manifestation of the coordinate grid cutting through the biomass—a vector of state power. Rivers rendered in deep radar-absorbent black are stripped of their ecological and localized contexts, re-coded purely as logistical arteries for the extraction of the subsurface minerals the map is designed to locate.
Through the synthesis of the airborne radar and the cartographic grid, the territory is entirely subordinated to the map.