Unearthing Waters: River Heritages of Amazonia

Abstract

“Unearthing Waters” challenges the failures of heritage preservation in landscape architecture, exposing how its conventions uphold systems of exclusion instead of dismantling them. Placed as both a spatial archive and counterfactual speculation, it foregrounds traditional river heritages as counter-frameworks for land back initiatives in Brazil’s Amazon River basin, envisioning alternative pathways toward territorial justice. Rooted in site-specific ecologies of repair, this initiative structures a new communal program: The Amazon River Reparation Complex. Unlike regional conservation and industrial complexes, this endeavor unfolds as an active counter-archeology, unearthing historical land trauma through mobilized local insurgencies set in 2035. These acts retrace the submerged histories and contested geographies of the region, critiquing how extractive infrastructures have erased cultural landscapes and land rights across three conflict sites — from Indigenous settlements flooded by hydropower reservoirs in Amazonas, to archeological sites buried beneath transportation ports in Santarém, and riverine communities mined near the Xingu River.