Mariana Luiza Fiocco Machini

MARIANA MACHINI, then a graduate student at University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil, was approved funding to aid research on “Landscapes-in-Disaster in the Context of the Collapse of the Fundão dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil” supervised by Dr. José Guilherme Cantor Magnani. This project investigated how communities affected by the 2015 Fundão dam collapse in Brazil navigate life amid long-term environmental and social disruption. Fieldwork was conducted over 12 months in two key locations — Paracatu de Baixo (Mariana, MG) and Santa Cruz (Aracruz, Espiritu Santo) — which lie along the Rio Doce basin. The research explored how residents respond to ongoing contamination, forced displacement, and climate-related challenges by rebuilding relationships with damaged landscapes and reasserting their political agency. Using ethnographic methods — including interviews, participant observation, and audiovisual documentation — the study found that local memory practices, such as storytelling, art, and public rituals, are crucial tools for maintaining community identity and demanding justice. Emotional connections to rivers and land continue to shape how people live, remember, and resist. In both regions, artistic expression and everyday practices are used to challenge official narratives that portray the disaster as resolved. The study also examined how overlapping crises — including severe floods and contested compensation policies — intensify the sense of ongoing disaster. It revealed the importance of treating disasters not as one-time events but as extended, dynamic processes. These findings contribute to broader debates in anthropology and environmental justice on how people survive, resist, and adapt in contexts of slow violence and ecological collapse.