Notes for a elusive cartography

Initially presented at the Cartographies and Memory as Practices of Relational Knowledge

Production seminar in November 2017, organized by Adina Radosh Sverdlin, María
del Carmen Macías, Silvia Muñoz, Carolina Céspedes Arce and Constanza
Millán, for the fifth convergence Unsettling the Americas: Radical
Hospitalities and Intimate Geographies at the Ibero-American University in
Mexico City and the York University in Toronto, Canada. On this framework, I
gave the present article like a sketch and notes for a “elusive cartography
methodology”.

ffelixluna@gmail.com

Not a day goes by without the rectangles of clean cut grass

being altered at the Praça Paris in Rio de Janeiro. There was
not medium to capture the incredible variation in this
geographic setting. I tried the photo, drawings, writing, even a
Candomble offering in the traditional way, looking to make a
cartography of a small area but all my attempts as the “french
gardening” imposed here, were in vain.
In these images are the main perspectives of the
Praça Paris, their central avenue, their monuments,
and the reflect of Rio de Janeiro in their fountains.
My house was next to the Praça Paris. For more
than a year I lived here. One of the oldest houses
at the Taylor alley. The half of the construction (a
portuguese facade all in wood and all in pastel
colors) disappeared in a big fire.
In 1930 the plan was to adopt
many ideas of the
Haussmannian urbanism and
rules of the french and modern
distribution of living spaces, the
flow and transport of the
masses, the industrialism and
the delimitation of green areas,
but of all this project, only the
Praça Paris was builded in Rio
de Janeiro.
From the remaining mountain (Santa Teresa) I
see the silhouette of this places. From those holes
we could imagine the chants, the dances, the fire
of fugitive communities, escaped slaves and
others that conformed the old Quilombos on the
elevations.
 There exist some pictures taken from the
disappeared hills. This photos at the Instituto
Moreira Salles RJ, are entitled: A Glória* vista do
Morro do Castelo (the glory seen from the Castelo
mountain). Only flying we could have again this
perspectives of the city and its title could suggest
to a lost glory.

*Glória is the neighborhood between Centro and

Flamengo neighbourhoods at Rio.

The symmetrie, the same size standard, the orthogonal

disposition, the perspective, the line of sight in all
directions of the Praça Paris seems as a part of a
comprehensive plan of the nascent regime of Getulio
Vargas in 1930, it seems as a gardening of the
Dictatorship.
 In my house, the restant white lime plaster that still
remains on the walls, suggest a Rio de Janeiro
horizon.

Bromelias, heliconias, jacarandas, paineras, mosses

and other neotropical species are in a tension in
between the expansive and the compressed of the
french archetype at the Praça Paris. Here the “random”
is the Sun King growing up in every part.
 Dig and erect, the order of
progress.
From the decade of 1920 to 1930, we have some images of
the Morro do Castelo and Santo Antonio Castelo
Video
destructions.

Part of the relief of Rio de Janeiro was erased under

the motto “order and progress”. The borning
Dictatorship (the Estado Novo of Getulio Vargas) was
the pattern and measure to accommodate the
geography and its inhabitants, as if that dictatorship
were the positive reason that ended chaos.

The Praça Paris, is situated over the rubbles of the

foundational mountains of Rio de Janeiro.
In my house i see the external light cues // Some
removed bricks that expanded the doorframe // Six
stones on top of each other // A spiral staircase //
another straight staircase with a very steep slope
that recalls the pre-Hispanic pyramids //
fragmented objects visible only by small holes on
the walls.

The facade of the house have not windows

(all of them were boarded up) but some lights
are leaking as rain water. The place works
like a camera obscura. The images of the
exterior appear inverted and disappear. The
construction is a kind of small rooms that
were used as ‘galeras’ for the slaves. The
stones are erosioned by the contact of many
hands, if we could see them in the light those
stones should be bright.
In this daguerreotype (one of the first captures of the
American continent made by Louis Daguerre’s
disciples) we can see the imperial Battalion of Don
Pedro II in its immovable formation in the Praça XV at
Rio de Janeiro, while the passersby and the curious
have disappeared because they moved during this
long photographic capture.

The historian Pedro Vásquez in his book A fotografia

no Brasil e Dom Pedro II, say that in Brazil the
photography was widespread by the empire with
propagandistic purposes, and in its images the public
places became phantasmagorical.
(this is a first part, sketch and uncorrected translation)

An “original” version could be founded at:

https://goo.gl/JpRkcE

The images in this document are compressed in GIF format, to reduce their size and
make it easier their transmission and looking to put the registry, document, archive
and artistic gesture, under a same plot without the eager ‘high resolution’ that fills, if is
not supplanting their places.