- Title: Terra Inscrita: Topographic Scars \ Sedimenting Memories
- Category: Master Thesis
- Student/s: Alberto Salgado Harres
- Course Title: Master Thesis
- Lecturer/s: Dr. Petra Klusemeyer, Prof. Ralf Baecker, Luiz Zanotello
- Year: WS 2024/25
Terra Inscrita is an artistic project conducted between Bremen, Germany, and Vale do Cuiabá, Brazil. It seeks to address personal and collective trauma through a material-centered artistic practice. The project stems from personal memories of the floods and landslides of January 2011 in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—an event that left visible scars on the mountains and rivers, as well as on those who inhabit the region, including myself.
Being a witness to such events, even from a position of safety and privilege, left personal marks—scars that reflect those in the landscape and in our community. This artistic research seeks to deal with these scars, map them, trace them, and re-live them.
As the first step in this research, 5kg of clay was locally extracted from Vale do Cuiabá, where I grew up. The clay was then filtered, dried, and packed to Bremen. This “migrant” piece of soil (terra) forms the foundation for a material-specific investigation. It is understood not as a passive material to be shaped but as an intra-acting agent—the constituting matter of this landscape’s ongoing process of becoming.
In an attempt to use clay as a writing medium, a kinetic installation was developed. This machine uses a small magnet to traverse a pool of clay sediments and water, guided by a stronger magnet positioned beneath the pool. The movement of the magnet is controlled by a CNC-like mechanism, which operates along an X-Y axis, enabling precise and dynamic interactions with the material.
The first prototype of this machine was shown at the exhibition Studies of Change at Alte Pathologie. Still uncovering the direction of the research, at this stage, the installation was an abstract exploration of materiality, focusing on the dynamic relationship between clay sediments and water.
While back in Brazil between June and September 2024, in Vale do Cuiabá, where these memories come from, I sought to understand the nature of these events. The marks left on the landscape were retraced by comparing satellite images from Google Earth, taken before and after the flood. This retracing process also served as a metaphor for revisiting and processing these memories.
To translate these topographic traces into machine movements, a path-finding algorithm was employed. This ensured that the machine’s movements consistently followed the natural paths of water and the contours of the land, echoing the flows and marks left by the flood.
This research also sought to listen to other members of the community still living there, traversing through differences to find what could be shared. Through a collaborative process with a local community therapy group, an affective mapping was created with participants, drawing from their personal memories and experiences of the 2011 floods.
The mapping was made using nine sheets of blotting paper that had been sitting in my grandmother’s drawers for decades, including during the time of the flood. These papers are present here as material witnesses of some kind. The resulting map reflects our collective affective relationship to the Cuiabá River basin, the memories flowing through it, and the hope for a community still somewhat disconnected even 13 years later.
To share this research process with those still living along the Cuiabá River, an exhibition took place in early 2024 at Estação Jaqueira, a local community space focused on art and education, previously functioning as a farm-hotel that was destroyed by the floods of 2011.
Unlike its first iteration at Alte Pathologie, this version incorporated satellite-derived visuals of the Cuiabá River basin. Emerging from the field of clay and water were traces of the basin itself, visualized through the machinic gesture.
The exhibition became a space for dialogue, connecting local people from different backgrounds through the common language of the landscape and its shared memories. It was an attempt to resist the constant process of forgetting one’s own history, a characteristic of Brazilian society and much of the colonized world.
The final stage of this project was to bring the exhibition back to Bremen, now incorporating all the elements that had emerged during the research conducted back in Brazil. The layering of these cartographies, far removed from their original context, became a way to explore this research as a potential methodology. It reflects on how an artistic practice grounded in material agency can contribute to addressing personal and collective trauma in the aftermath of environmental disasters—an increasingly urgent global reality.
- Therapy Group conducted by: Fernanda
- Participants in the Affecting Cartography: Pedro, Vilma, Monique, Vera, Sueli, Luciana, Leda, Mauricea, Ana Maria, Lígia, Tereza, Jaqueline, Virgínia
- Curatorship of exhibition Estação Jaqueira: Carlos Feijó
- Photos from 2011: Eduardo Gelli