This text brings together fragments of memory, reflections on family migration, and discussions of montage to investigate how colonial, gendered, and extractive forms—structural, not isolated, phenomena: land dispossession, extractive economies, and gendered violence—persist in bodies, landscapes, and images. Using a hybrid methodology that interweaves experimental film montage, psychoanalytic theory, and decolonial thought, it explores projection as a psychic and cinematic architecture—operating dually to superimpose trauma onto landscapes (as in Brasília’s modernist grid overwriting sertão geographies through developmentalist erasure), and to transfer colonial violence through fragmented memory (where Jesuit conversion rhetoric masked conquest, extraction, and enslavement as salvation). Subjectivity thus becomes shaped under regimes of visibility, violence, and desire.

Anchored in my grandparents’ internal migration from the sertão of Rio Grande do Norte to Brasília’s construction sites (1950–60)—part of the mass displacement engineered by state-led developmentalism—I trace how land commodification, drought policies, and labor precarity replicated colonial logics of expendability. Their story mirrors the candango workers’ strikes and the Queixadas revolt in Perus, where cement dust suffocated bodies to build modernist utopias—a terrain where intimacy, too, became asymmetrical exchange.

The work engages with psychoanalytic and colonial frameworks while employing montage as both method and philosophy.

This writing proposes a non-linear journey through personal and historical events, entangling itself in a web that unfolds through its trajectory—where the extraction of resources and the violence inflicted upon those deprived of their ways of life serve as a lens to reflect on how historical traumas sediment into everyday life.

This research opens a space of tension and resonance, where cinematic and subjective ruptures become generative tools for reimagining these connections and envisioning relational and planetary futures.

Author: Claudia Medeiros