Maloca Apertures The maloca inverts the horizontal regime of vision and image. It is built as if it was no interest in determining the exterior as a landscape through an orthogonal aperture. Its walls —that are very short compared to the dimension of the maloca— are blind, and all of them seems to be dedicated to an interior vertical window. This inversion, compared to the vertical gaze in occidental architecture, seems to respond to a politic fact: the shape of the maloca come from the meeting of a group of individual tapiri* in a circle, that turns its circular back to the deep forest. The maloca reproduces a visual economy that does not consist of images through windows. The vegetation around is so intense that makes the epistemology of the figure on a background defail. The gaze inside the forest is not useful to construct images; it is forced to receive signals. Horizontal viewing suffers an epistemological and political displacement. The maloca, in high areas, ends up closing this central opening and is definitely defined as a large basket without windows. Sometimes the braiding of the roof lets inside the light. Its refraction in the smoke, that usually fills the maloca, makes the light visible.
*The tapiri is the minimal unit of the architectural economy in Amazonas. It consists of a simple flat vegetable roof supported by one or two vegetable pillars. Its construction can be transitional —it becomes fixed when a number of tapiri meet and become a maloca—. It could be considered an index of minimum presence of human, and it is usually used in isolation by small family groups in movement inside the forest or during hunting trips. But it is not only an architectural device; it's also an ontological translator. It’s possible that every architectural device, not only tapiri in Amazonas, retains this strange translating function which is clearly visible in procedures of contact with isolated communities. In order to establish a relationship with an isolated group that only appears as a hypothesis, a tapiri is built inside the forest —an artificial roof below the natural roof—, and under the roof are placed some objects (machados, ropes, clothes). These objects are ontologically translated by the tapiri from its condition as bodies to a condition as words; they become the primary words to a future symbolic relationship. If, after a period of time, the tapiri appears broken, it means that the contact hasn't been accepted, it means that the answer is no non-communication. But if the objects of the tapiri disappear or are substituted by other objects from the isolated community, the exchange of symbols could be done.
Photographic registers of 11 artificial vertical light flashes in Homoxi The exercise consisted in registering 11 vertical flash emissions performed through forest glades in Homoxi Region. All the registers were made from its emission and pretended to catch the volume of technical virtuality injected inside a geography where some epistemological and political phenomenons resonates with them. The one that seems more obvious is the fact that Homoxi is 400 km far away from artificial light occupations; it’s an epistemological regime of natural obscurity and lighting, and the columns of technical virtuality supposed a kind of intrusion, of displacement: as introducing a transparent crystal in a place where transparency statute has another meaning or no meaning. Another of the resonances was the vertical cones of mercury smoke that were emitted during amalgam synthesis due to illegal gold extraction, visible during the day through the vegetation. As a strange light, the smoke was the rest of a summary that constitutes a gold pound from the river mud. As artificial light flash for the image, the amalgam deduces a previous non-existent pound of gold from the chaotic blured river powder. The image and the pound of gold are the product of technologies that collapses identifiable borders to deep obscurity of night or the informal mass of river mud. Although, in the case of the exercise, there was another conjecture: To what extent the purity of the pound of gold was equivalent to the purity of the registered virtual volume of artificial light? To what extent the impurity in the pound of gold —organic rests of the river— was the impurity of black surface —spots of humidity, maybe an insect, the digital noise—?