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Life by the Rio Doce is not a pure, untouched dream, but a deeply grounded, communicative, unclear and contaminated process. From this fertile ground, decomposing and recomposing, radically new futures can slowly sprout.
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Diagram presenting the communities impacted, the infrastructural basis of the system, the existing tailings dams and their volume and the distance between all of these and the main site at Rio Doce.
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Visitors can walk along the observation platform to look at the heaps of tailings being moved.
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Movements of accumulation and dispersion of tailings within the Rio Doce site.
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Instead of “cleaning” the river, the forest allows for terrestrial animals to return to the margins where they now find shelter and food. The critters repopulate the bottom of the Doce and generations of fish, shrimp, crabs and insects succeed each other.
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Assembly of a new structure using precast geopolymer concrete elements experimentally designed.
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Two people relax in the restaurant after a day of collecting the seeds of the aroeira trees. They look at the river, their giant brother, unfurling towards the sea. This is a moment of respite and dignity.
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Minas, as in mines
Alina da Porciúncula Paias. Rio Doce, Brazil
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Name of work in English
Minas, as in mines
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Name of work in original language
A hauntological approach to the site of disaster
Prize year
Young Talent 2023
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Work Location
Rio Doce, Brazil
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Author/s
Alina da Porciúncula Paias
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School
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment - Delft University of Technology.
Delft, The Netherlands
Young Talent 2023 YT Nominees
Minas, as in mines
A hauntological approach to the site of disaster
Program
Mixed use - Cultural & Social
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Labels
Aggregation · Facilities · Research · Nature · Community
In the southeast of Minas Gerais, vulnerability is produced through the interaction with the determining presence of megamines. By tracing the entanglements across the Rio Doce valley this project deals with “minor” places and stories and refuses to treat the processes of large scale material movement and accumulation as too large to address or change.
This proposal works under a different framing of justice, informed by its connection to the notion of responsibility as laid out by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in his writings on hauntology (an ontology of the not-there). From the initial hauntological approach this project manipulates and questions associated concepts such as response-ability, entanglement, ongoingness, contamination, co-constitution, purity and complexity, drawing from several theoretical sources, and proposes life-affirming site for the circulation of materials, people and knowledge, against the threat of premature death posed by the extractive economy. That happens through two main interventions interventions: spanning the entire river valley, the Line of Gift is a system for the movement of people that is executed through the appropriation of the existing extractive infrastructure, especially the Vitória-Minas railway. Simultaneously, a smaller node at the town of Rio Doce associates community-based productive activities to the fabrication of geopolymer concrete building elements using iron ore tailings as fillers. The continued production of this material is guaranteed through the supply of tailings from several soon-to-be-deactivated dams following a national resolution passed in 2019.