memory
is
elsewhere

From darkness, a tiny, minuscule, insignificant spark burst out. Almost imperceptible, but that which insisted on coming into being. To attentive ears, if there were any present, one could identify a discrete short circuit. Soon came the first flame; its noise, earlier subtle, escalated to a larger kind that cracked intensely. The stuffy, reclusive interior began to light up from within.

In a rapid and destructive increase, the fire took hold of the palace. Strong outbursts soon followed. Explosions and glass cases shattered where thousand year-old objects were kept, now voraciously swallowed by those machine-flames already metres high. In a tragic choreography, the fire swallowed up everything that dared to stand in the way of its expansion. Soon, the cracking and shattering of glass was followed by the collapse of entire structures. In this funereal orchestra, iron girders twisted and folded to little resistance, floors gave way to bring ceilings to their knees, amidst the sounds of repeated explosion.

Everything inside and surrounding the palace burned and collapsed indiscriminately. The fire, as if starving, consumed everything: documents, columns, fossils, utensils, feathered headdresses, roof tiles, guest books, catalogues, clothes, notebooks, tickets, taxidermic models, embalmed specimens, furniture, maquettes, computers, shelves, benches, paintings, pedestals, prototypes, skeletons, instruments, leaflets. Insatiable and total, a combustion of worlds.

Two months after its bicentennial, on September 2nd, 2018, Brazil’s Museu Nacional, housed in the former imperial palace named Palácio de São Cristóvão in Rio de Janeiro, was severely destroyed by a fire. Newspapers of the next day reported the tragedy: throughout most of the night, flames destroyed 90% of the country’s oldest collection, the largest of such kind in Latin America and the fifth largest in the world. 73,050 days of existence, 4 hours burning in flames, nearly 20 million items in a devenir cendres (becoming-ashes). A vast material heritage brought to ashes.

Forensics later confirmed the fire’s source: an air conditioner short circuited, incorrectly installed to cool down the ground floor auditorium.²

Many were in shock and desolated. The disaster of the Museu Nacional was a prelude to political, cultural and economic regression, to the resurgence of Brazilian fascism: an annihilistic culture soon to take power as exemplified in the image of Jair Bolsonaro, elected President just two months later.

Uncontrollable fire and new forms of tyranny share the same destructive eagerness; by scorching and letting burn, both regardlessly convert variety and richness into homogeneous matter—into ashes. As Franco Bifo Berardi wrote, contemporary fascism “is not a marginal manifestation of American ignorance. It is rather the tired roar of an old beast that, before dying, attempts to destroy the last remnants of humanity and the history of mankind.” ³

1 Proverb from Martinique: “what you lose in the fire, you will find amidst the ashes” (our translation)

2 Berlant, Lauren: The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*. In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016, Vol. 34(3), 393–419, 393.

3 In: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/franco-bifo-berardi-the-inevitable-and-the-unpredictable/7114

4 In Brazil, bandeiras were violent historical expeditions which had as their objective the territorial exploration of Portuguese “claimed land” in the American continent, as well as the capture and enslavement of native peoples.

5 It is interesting to note that the very concept of owning land does not make sense in the indigenous cosmologies, but was eventually absorbed by them in their social struggle as a political tool for survival and their claim of rights.

6 In this regard it is worth noting the asymmetry of the figure of Rondon, a representative of the State and its intrinsic violence towards the native peoples, but object of the purest European colonial racism. In Rondon: a biography (2019), Larry Rohter writes about the racism perpetrated by Fawcett (an English explorer of the Royal Geographical Society) and his treatment of Rondon: “English explorers like Percy Fawcett, a graduate of the Royal Geographical Society course, and the writer and adventurer Arnold Henry Savage Landor constantly belittled Rondon in their private correspondence and public writings, often with racist terms”.

the
sheer
contradiction
Rondon 

Cândido Rondon (1865–1958) was a Brazilian military officer famous for having “contributed” to the integration of the western and northern regions of Brazil. Rondon became a central figure in historical incursions to regions of the country unexplored by colonial and republican agents. Most (in)famously, he was assigned to construct a telegraphic network over a series of expeditions to Brazil’s inland between 1907 and 1915. This would later become known as the Rondon Commission.

Although his expeditions were not violent like the so-called bandeiras⁴, and have in fact gained notoriety for not being violent, some elements of symbolic violence inevitably persisted. The primary objective of these expeditions was to implement telegraph lines between distant small villages and the political centre of the State. The farthest villages were inhabited by indigenous communities already living there for hundreds of years, among them, the Haliti-Paresí.⁵

The incorporation of such vast territory by means of telegraph infrastructure, however, is not only of the order of symbolic violence but of physical violence as well, since by defining the locations for the installation of the telegraphic apparatus, the nation-state as represented by the Rondon Commission irreversibly ripped the native lands:

“He (Rondon) showed maps and, among the native leaders of the Haliti-Paresí community, decreed ‘“This area here is yours, from that point on, it is already the area belonging to whites, to imóti’”.

(ROTHER, 2019, p. 407)

“The main line (...)  penetrated the rough wild hinterland (sertão bruto), crossing the Paresí’cis plateau, situated in the valleys of the Sumidouro, Sacuriu-iná, Sangue, Cravary, Sacre, Papagaio, Burity, Saueruiná and Juruena rivers, in which whose zones were inaugurated the telegraphic stations named Parecis, Ponte de Pedra, Barão de Capanema, Utiarity, Juruena, Nambiquara and Vilhena.”

(Rondon, 1907-1910, p. 15 apud Machado, 1994, p. 264)

The implementation of such telegraph posts interfered greatly in the dynamics of the populations that were required to house these devices in their territories. In the Haliti-Paresí’s case, the construction took place on Ponte de Pedra (Stone Bridge), a natural bridge at the end of a series of waterfalls and streams—a site that, in their cosmology, was the centre of the world, the place where the Haliti (as the Paresí refer to themselves) had originated. Such implementation of telegraph infrastructure therefore represents an unquestionable, world-ending mark of the violence perpetrated by the nation-state.

Our aim, however, is not to vilify Marshal Rondon and his telegraphic project. Rather, we perceive him as an irreducible historical figure embodying of complexity and sheer contradiction: a mestizo-military-positivist-data-collector and descendant of natives⁶, who strived for peace and non-violence while practising his unique, State-sanctioned form of expansionism. Under the belief that natives should be incorporated into white, Western culture in a peaceful manner, Rondon would bear the motto “never kill, die if necessary” across his expeditions. This belief held that differences would be extinguished through cultural assimilation when, in fact, the assimilation into so-called civilization is never fulfilled, except in a subordinate and de-humanizing condition. Furthermore, through their ethnographic eagerness to collect artefacts, record songs and document habits assumed on the verge of disappearance, the Rondon expeditions paradoxically considered the disappearance of natives as inevitable, denying them any ancestral future under the aegis of Brazilian capitalism. This is, in short, the inherent ambiguity (and to a great extent, perversity) of Brazil’s Old Republic ethnographic archival practice, which compounded tenderness, hypocrisy, mourning, dispossession and dehumanisation all at once.

archive
as
architecture,
architecture
as
archive 

The history (and aftermaths) of the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro productively complicate Brazil’s presumably innocent, ill-examined national identity and its often acritical relationship towards its own material collections. In this regard, we follow the lessons contained in Achille Mbembe’s seminal text The Power of the Archive and its Limits (2002), of the archive’ inextricable connection to its building. That is to say, the archive’s power and status, its operability, cannot prescind of its architectural dimension.

What makes the Museu Nacional and its architectural host since 1892 exceptionally peculiar is the repressed history of the site itself, Quinta da Boa Vista⁷. The Museu was founded on June 6th, 1818 by an official decree of Portuguese King John VI, in an attempt by the crown to establish the cultural conditions for governance in the new capital of the empire, Rio de Janeiro. The crown had run away from Napoleon I in his imminent invasion of Portugal, fleeing to Brazil. Right after its arrival, the crown “elevated” Brazil’s status from colony to that of kingdom, transforming it into the capital of the short-lived transatlantic empire, the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. In 1822 King John VI’s son, Prince Pedro, was acclaimed Dom Pedro I, “Emperor of Brazil” ⁸. This marked Brazil’s independence from Portugal and the beginning of the so-called Brazilian empire (1822–1889).

Following the dissolution of the Brazilian empire in 1889 and the beginning of the Republican period, the Museu Nacional switched its premises in 1892 from a building in downtown Rio de Janeiro to the old imperial palace which once served as residence to the Portuguese royal family and the Brazilian monarchy. Located on a former Jesuit farm, this palace was donated by a Portuguese slave trader named Elias António Lopes to John VI upon his arrival. Inseparably associated with the Museu Nacional thereafter, the São Cristóvão palace would become notable for being that peculiar sort of historical periscope, an archive-monument and fictional symbol opportunistically updated according to the latest arrangements of the imagined community Brazil.

8  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinta_da_Boa_Vista 

9 The reason for the imperial title was that the title of king would symbolically mean a continuation of the Portuguese dynastic tradition.

9 Such as Baron of Langsdorff, the Prince of Wied-Neuwied, Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Karl Von Martius, Johannes Natterer, and Alcide d'Orbigny, among many others.

10 In: Roquette-Pinto, E. Rondônia. 2nd edition, Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1919.

11 Spirits made from maize.

12 In: Roquette-Pinto, E. Rondônia. 2nd edition, Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1919 [our translation].

13 The secret society of the Iyamaka, the Paresí-Haliti ‘flutes’. In: SALLES, PEDRO PAULO.

14 ALBERT, Bruce; KOPENAWA, Davi. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Harvard University Press, 2023

15 ALBERT, Bruce; KOPENAWA, Davi. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Harvard University Press, 2023

shadows
of
the
voice

The Rondon Commission was not the first endeavour in land surveyance nor was it the first attempt to foster territorial integration. These were so-called challenges that had arisen since the early colonial period, but given a considerable boost in the 18th and 19th centuries through the figures of foreign explorers⁹. What makes this undertaking unique to that of European explorations—we argue—is Rondon’s figure himself and the commission’s clearly defined positivist objective, to integrate the national territory through telegraph technology.

Only in its fourth edition would the Rondon Commission become notable for its ethnographic achievements. Now operating with the endorsement of the Museu Nacional, Marshal Rondon invited the young physician-anthropologist and museum employee Edgar Roquette-Pinto (1884–1954) to join him on his expedition to Serra do Norte (at the southeast of Mato Grosso State, near the border with Bolivia). Influenced by German ethnology and one of its main representatives, Adolf Bastian, Roquette-Pinto would make use of instruments such as the Edison portable phonograph, as well as other filmic and photographic apparatuses which allowed him to document cultural traits that were proclaimed (by white men) on the verge of extinction due to the irreversible march of modernity.

In September 1912, Roquette-Pinto arrived in the Haliti-Paresí territory where he recorded the songs and music of its native peoples. Reports from his book Rondônia (1919) draw little attention to the nature of his ethnographic encounters, instead referred to as acts of “forensic measurement” ¹⁰ likely made without concern for the consent of those recorded. One can infer they were made quite leisurely by Roquette-Pinto and his team (though, of course, premeditatedly) during festive and inebriated moods:

“To satisfy my request, Luiz Cintra promoted a big kauwlonenâ, where the death of a deer was celebrated, drinking oloniti ¹¹. At night, the women retired to the hut and the men came to our ranch, armoured with jararacas, to sing and dance in celebration of the hunt, standing around a large gourd where a deer was lying in slices. And, thus, I managed to catch in the phonograph the music of the main Paresí songs: Ualalôcê, Teirù, Ceiritâ, etc.” ¹²

It is important to emphasise the ritualistic character of the aforementioned songs and the prohibition of listening for the Haliti-Paresí women, who could not witness their performance under penalty of death. Roquette-Pinto continued:

“They segregate them from the ceremonies of their cult; they hide the sacred instruments of the tribe from their eyes, affirming that the woman who sees them will die; they do not allow them to dance and sing in their company” (1917:81).

According to a study on the Haliti-Paresí cosmologies of Paresí flutes and songs¹³, the flute (here, inseparable from its music) is seen as a power-bearing entity which holds a central role in the origin myths of their people. In this conception, the Paresí flute is not a mere object or instrument but a being and sacred entity, the recording of such chants and flute-playing constitutive of disrespect, within a reification and desacralisation of the Paresí cosmogony. 

When asked about the recordings of his oral accounts made from 1989 to 2000 by his long-time interlocutor, the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, revered Yanomami shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa replied:

“When these tapes that hold the shadow of my words are no longer working, do not throw them out. Do not burn them until they are very old and my stories have long since become drawings that white people can look at.” ¹⁴

If writing is presented less as testimony and more as a drawing, a project, then the recorded speeches do not appear as speeches themselves, but as the cast and shadows of the words Kopenawa had spoken. They should be apprehended by the white people through Bruce Albert’s work, he sustains:

“These words will never disappear. They will always remain in our thinking, even if the white people throw away the paper skins of this book in which they are drawn and even if the missionaries, who we call the people of Teosi, always call them lies. They can neither be watered down nor burned. They will not get old like those that stay stuck to image skins made from dead trees. When I am long gone, they will still be as new and strong as they are now. I asked you to set them on this paper in order to give them to the white people who will be willing to know their lines. Maybe then they will finally lend an ear to the inhabitants of the forest’s words and start thinking about them in a more upright manner?” ¹⁵

ashes
-
archives

None of the wax cylinders recorded by Roquette-Pinto in the 1912 expedition survived the fire. When the Museu Nacional intended to digitise the phonograms in the 2000s, the cylinders were already in poor condition. A partial copy on 12-inch vinyl discs, made by Roquette-Pinto in 1937, still existed. Due to the inability to restore or use the original wax cylinder recordings, the 1912 recordings were digitised from these vinyl discs.¹⁶ The copy of the copy turned to ashes as well.

Fire appears central to the Western delirium of destruction and expansion. The Court of the Holy Office once burned women, so-called heretics, and books. Imperialist and colonial powers used napalm to incinerate its enemies. In search of economic gain, the Amazon forest has suffered a devastating onslaught of deforestation through fire at the hands of gold miners and land grabbers, contributing to the unprecedented destruction of the local (and global) biome. Untouched moist rainforests do not burn by themselves; the fires in the Amazon are ignited intentionally.¹⁷ Georges Didi-Huberman writes:

“If the memory of fire is in every page that did not burn, it is also true that, when it comes to official history and all its capacity for self-preservation founded in writing as a remnant of the Jesuit colonization, more than recalling fire, that official history communicates that its own survival occurs thanks to the flames it obstinately causes [to others]” ¹⁸

(Didi-Huberman, 2012; Taylor, 2013, our translation)

The ashes of the Museu Nacional are remains; they are ashes-archives. To recognize the ashes of its blaze as not only a trace but as the totality of what has burned is to continue inhabiting the very situated “field” that the forces of fire and destruction thought they would extinguish. It is not to vacate, but resist. Native writer, activist and philosopher Aílton Krenak has described such thought already during the Memórias Ancestrais ¹⁹ (ancestry memories) night watch held adjacent to the Museu in April 2023:

“[The Museu Nacional’s fire] was a serious loss. But imagine if we didn’t have the memory of all that burned? Imagine if we were not able to remember all that burned? And notice, what incredible difference, to have a memory, even if the materiality of things disappears. Even if those tree logs finish burning [pointing to the bonfire in front of him], we remember the tree logs, we remember fire. So it is this memory… this memory, to give a poetic sense to it, we could call it ‘memory of fire’. When Eduardo Galiano wants to tell stories of the history of Latin America’s colonization, he evokes episodes that he calls ‘memories of fire’, when the most ancient peoples of this continent told stories of [its formation], this pachamama, the Andes, the mountains... so, it is a wonderful story, and now, it appears, blessed by rain. […] I would like us to have the opportunity of having an open dialogue about memory, memory as this experience of one generation to another, millenary, immemorial, in a certain sense. […] The idea is that memory always existed, [cannot be lost by fire] and we, from generation to another, carry it.” ²⁰

Ashes-archives stand against the destructive fires of unconscious human origin that pathologically strive for endless consummation.²¹ Returning to Mbembe (2002), what remains of the Museu Nacional, whether as spectre or ashes-archive, contains within itself a vector for redeeming its own destruction:

“The destroyed archive haunts the state in the form of a spectre, an object that has no objective substance, but which, because it is touched by death, is transformed into a demon, the receptacle of all utopian ideals and of all anger, the authority of a future judgement.”

An expanded notion of the archive, not only in its visible material dimension but also in its immaterial one (unrecorded forms of writing, oralities, memories, enchantments), here emerges as something that puts into question the conventional, obsolete Western conception of archive in its architected organisation of displaced, anonymised, and stolen material.

16 See https://soundcloud.com/nimuendaju/sets/rondonia and http://www.etnolinguistica.org/biblio:roquete-pinto-1912-rondonia

17 https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2022/09/amazonia-ja-tem-mes-de-setembro-sob-bolsonaro-com-mais-queimadas.shtml 

18 In Portuguese: “Se a memória do fogo está em cada folha que não ardeu, é verdade também que, quando se trata da história oficial e toda sua capacidade de autopreservação, fundada na escrita, como resquício da colonização jesuítica, mais do que lembrar incêndios, ela comunica que sua própria sobrevivência se dá graças às chamas que obstinadamente causa”.

19 See: https://selvagemciclo.com.br/ciclo-memorias-ancestrais/

20 Online here, in Portuguese, from 2:55 min. on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m8C2fKAIX8

21 Consummation: Action d'amener quelque chose à son terme, à son maximum.