A última aventura
Photography and installation · 2011–2013
A Última Aventura results from a journey of nearly four thousand kilometers along the Trans-Amazonian Highway and through cities crossed by the twentieth-century projects for the occupation of the Amazon.
Along the route, Romy Pocztaruk passed through roads, settlements and landscapes marked by initiatives that associated infrastructure, development and territorial conquest with the promise of a national future — among them, Fordlândia, an industrial enterprise founded by Henry Ford in the interior of Pará.
Built during the military dictatorship as part of the Programa de Integração Nacional, the Trans-Amazonian Highway was announced as a route of integration between the Northeast and the Amazon, an instrument of colonization, national security and development.
More than infrastructure, it became the image of a geopolitical ambition: to occupy what the regime described as territorial "voids", to assert sovereignty and to transform the Amazon into the horizon of a Brazil-as-power.
In the photographs, interrupted roads, abandoned buildings, disused equipment and vegetation advancing over constructions do not appear as proof of a closed failure.
They are forms in which different times remain active: the promise of progress, the present of the landscape and the projections that still fall upon the Amazon.
Romy Pocztaruk · contato@romypocz.com · Instagram @romypocz