The Arts of Remediation: Seeing the Amazon Otherwise

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on three recent ecological crises in the Amazon: the 2019 wildfires, the 2023 droughts, and the COVID-19 years (2020–23), which overlapped with a surge in illegal gold mining. It examines how colonial and nation-building visual regimes that have long brought high visibility to the Amazon and its Indigenous inhabitants might be reinforced during these high-profile events—partly due to growing concerns about planetary climate change. In examining patterns of seeing, it engages a wide range of images from media coverage, documentary films, art and photojournalism, publicity campaigns, social media, and materials from the past that are echoed—sometimes inadvertently—in contemporary representations. At the same time, its key preoccupation is foregrounding the ways in which people from the Amazon are increasingly responding critically to those outsider images, transforming them into tools for looking otherwise.Drawing on environmental humanities, visual culture studies, and decolonial thought, the dissertation underscores these cultural productions by introducing the concept of arts of remediation: interventions that repurpose dominant visual regimes to expose colonial logics, preserve local memory, and assert collective, place-based knowledge. Through the arts of remediation, this dissertation shows how Amazonian places are becoming sites for pedagogy and decolonization.