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Material Virtuality: Remaking Rio de Janeiro’s Past and Present through Digital Media


Type

Thesis

Change log

Authors

Adams, Victoria 

Abstract

Since the 1970s, Brazil’s authorities have regarded the country’s past as a source of cultural and economic value (Gonçalves 2007; Collins 2015). In the late 2000s, a boom in Brazil’s consumer economy served to make smartphones and social media ubiquitous across the country (Spyer 2017). This thesis focuses on how these two phenomena intersect in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on material gathered during fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, it examines how a selection of cultural-historical projects use digital media to explore Rio’s past.

This thesis argues that, through their exploration of Rio’s past, each of these projects shapes how people engage with the city and state and reproduces their space (Lefebvre 1991). This analysis of how digital media intervene in the production of Rio’s space contributes to scholarship that explores Rio’s urban and cultural history (Sevcenko 2003; Needell 1987; Carvalho 2018). In so doing, it adds to literature exploring how the screens of digital media form an integral and constitutive part of the space of contemporary cities (McQuire 2016; Degen and others 2017).

The thesis also contends that the projects it examines all reflect and remake contemporary understandings of how Rio should be in ways that are contingent upon and shaped by the material context(s) from which they emerge, namely, Rio’s enduring history of racialised urbanism, its authorities’ shifting attitude to the past, and changes in Brazil’s approach to cultural funding following its return to democracy in the late 1980s (Sevcenko 2003; Gonçalves 2007; Rich and Vieira 2020). Through analysis of the impact of these factors and from the perspective of a city in the Global South, this thesis dialogues with a growing literature in media studies that examines how the historicity of different forms of technology shapes their affordances (Hu 2015; Crawford 2021).

The structure of the thesis moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs and rural hinterlands to examine the different ways that digital media are used to interrogate the past of these distinct areas. Chapter One focuses on Rio’s centre. It examines how the circulation of early photographs of Rio on an Instagram page called rioantigo transforms them into axes of debate about what kind of city Brazil’s former capital should be. Chapter Two moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs. It interrogates how a walking-tour initiative, Rolé Carioca, and a virtual museum, Rio Memórias, use a mixture of digital platforms and in-person events to encourage residents of Rio to reconnect with their city’s public spaces. Chapter Three considers how glitches, uneven provision of infrastructure, and deliberate acts of sabotage inform the shape of Passados Presentes, a project which uses digital media to explore the legacy of slavery across Rio state.

Description

Date

2022-07-01

Advisors

Conde, Maria

Keywords

Brazil, capital, city, digital media, heritage, infrastructures, leisure, materiality, memory, neoliberalism, race, Rio de Janeiro, rugosity, slavery, space, tourism, travel, urban reforms

Qualification

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Awarding Institution

University of Cambridge
Sponsorship
Cambridge Trust; Newnham College; Santander Travel Grant; Department of Modern and Medieval Languages of the University of Cambridge