V-ARCH · The Afterlives of the Plantation in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian World: a Visual Archaeology

To what extend and in what ways the Plantation regime survives and how to visualize it without reproducing its effects? V-ARCH answers this question by examining the plantation in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian world as a palimpsestic visual object that endures, while advancing a novel mode of inquiry produced through images rather than just on images – visual archaeology. As capitalist racialized nature, the plantation is responsible for the naturalisation and universalisation of colonial ways of inhabiting, knowing, and imagining landscapes that are at the root of the present climate crisis. As its effects become increasingly impossible to ignore, V-ARCH puts forward a thinking visually to re-historicise the plantation, visualise its afterlives, and reexamine hegemonic ways of relating to the land.Drawing on research in archives and museums and executing a sensory ethnography on plantationscapes in Brazil and Portugal, the methodology entails the assemblage of an open-source digital atlas to track the plantation’s routes. By juxtaposing visual representations of the plantation and its present afterlives, while also mobilising post-plantation ecologies, including Indigenous epistemologies and artistic practices, V-ARCH posits that a visual rereading of the past-present can counter the plantation as an encompassing model for the regulation of life.In terms of scientific and social impact, V-ARCH: 1) fills an epistemological gap by bringing to light the neglected Portuguese case-study within on-going international debates; 2) adds to a growing practice-based scholarship by advancing a visual methodology, while contributing to the fields of decolonial studies and ecocritical visual culture; 3) and partakes in the movement for reparations of landscapes by aligning with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Goals and EU’s new Nature Restoration Law. V-ARCH takes place at NOVA University of Lisbon, Federal University of Bahia, MNAC-Chiado Museum, and Center for Creative Ecologies (UCSC).