A river of red mud: an exploration of BR-319

The Amazon region represents to the Western World a limit of expansion, both physical and epistemic. In the past 200 years, the land and its people were subjected to forces of a changing world, crushing entire ways of being and ways of knowing. BR-319, an unpaved road built by the military in the 1970s, is the only land connection between Manaus and Porto Velho, and by consequence, the rest of Brazil. This road, soon to be repaved, presents a case of a world nearing its end, or arguably, its rebirth. While this socio-environmental dilemma is of extreme relevance to the region, it offers a portal to explore the fragility of that which seems unknowable and unsurpassable. Film photography, a fragile and sensitive medium, comes as a vessel to bring this fading world to light. The void between a dying world and the world to come into being is what these negatives carry. The road, therefore, is medium and a sign of a world wrestling to be born. The “world” ends every day, but it does not come in equal force to everyone.

Through a series of photographs, I intend to introduce a glimpse of this road that is and that is not. This journey crosses Amazonia not in the search for a formulaic solution of what must be done, but rather as a study of essence, of being and being-not, and of the reflection of the eyes that see devastation and shout progress.

Shot in December 2025, developed and printed on fiber paper winter of 2026. Frames built using salvaged wood.