Paulo Tavares's work explores the potential of image archaeology and fieldwork alongside communities to reveal and reconstruct historical processes of violence against populations (human and non-human) and the environment. In a journey that ranges from the expropriation of Indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, this collection of essays unveils the capacity of new (and old) media to respond to official discourses of colonization and political violence, and invites us to construct new conceptual and legal frameworks with which to protect ecosystems and other non-human entities from the acceleration and mass extraction of resources characteristic of the contemporary world.

“Making subversive use of existing technologies, acting in multidisciplinary collectives that come together around a common goal and then dissolve, is what the public advocacy office created by Tavares does to work at the intersection of space, media, and rights. (…) This is the “architecture as advocacy” that it defends. There, technical reports are prepared which, through the techniques of design, urban planning, or architecture, are used in the defense of indigenous rights.” Photographs, satellite data, seed dating, soil and vegetation analysis serve as forensic documents to show the ancestral occupation of these enclaves and refute their classification as terra nullius, the supposed demographic void that justified the colonization campaigns of the Amazon from the second half of the 20th century