Recrafting the Brazilian Arboreal Archive

This exhibit on the trees of Brazil’s archives is the seventh installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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In Brazil, the twentieth century was marked by rapid modernization, industrialization, and an aggressive, developmentalist appeal. This period is frequently defined as a transition or rupture, whereby the traditional agrarian communities transformed into urban and industrial ones. And as such, it is in this moment that a radical dichotomy between nature and culture grew.

In 2017, we began searching for iconographic archives and documents relating to the presence of nature in major Brazilian cities in the twentieth century. Photography would play a key role in documenting the modernization process. As urbanization efforts progressed, municipal governments commissioned photographers to construct and enforce an idealized visual representation of the “modern” cities.

When we looked at these images, one aspect caught our attention: Whilst they were intended to document the modernization of cities, they also documented the gradual, state-sanctioned disappearance of animals, rivers, and forests from urban spaces. Through these images, we see the human population being systematically stripped of its direct relationship with the land, replaced by a coexistence increasingly mediated by the state and the growing market. To make room for wide avenues, housing developments, buildings, and infrastructure, vast areas of native vegetation were cleared. Valleys, rivers, and hills were removed.

In the litany of photographs documenting the removal of non-human elements, another genre of images stood out: one where nature was ceremoniously reintroduced to the city. During our archival research, we found a recurring scene: various heads of state – including the then Prince Charles III of Wales on a visit to Brazil in 1991—planting tree seedlings at formal events to celebrate “Tree Day,” a commemorative day marked on the national calendar. While browsing these photographs, we were particularly drawn to the layers, gestures, and tensions present in the documentation of these ceremonies.

As cities became hotter and greyer, planting a tree became a political marketing strategy. It was, above all, very photogenic: simple and universally seen as good. Politicians used this gesture as a symbol of their alleged concern for collective well-being, as well as a way to secure their own legacy. This one-off action, low in cost and high in visual impact, began to function as a smokescreen for the lack of more profound and structural environmental policies. To shed light on these contradictions, we created Cidade-Jardim, or Garden City, a visual and literary artwork based on photographic and journalistic archives.

The Research: Rereading the Archive of Staged Plantings

The Tree Day scene is constructed for the photographic record. Satin ties, leather bags, stiletto heels, microphones, a military band, and children with their heads bowed down are common supporting actors in the event marked by excessive formality, pomp, and seriousness.

In contrast to the ceremoniousness of these events, hundreds of these trees were later unceremoniously sacrificed for motorways, ephemeral events, and other urban projects. The planting, reverentially started by politicians but more furtively completed by manual laborers, reveals its purpose: Beyond greening a city, the act of planting trees is ripe for political self-promotion.

Planting a tree sapling becomes a political gesture because, dialectically speaking, there is a deficit. The significance of this act lies in the fact that vegetation is being removed from the city.

Figure 1
Mayor Sousa Lima at a ceremony organized for Tree Week by the communications department of Belo Horizonte City Council, 1968
Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

Figure 1 shows the following scene: In the foreground, three children dressed in school uniforms  are positioned around a young tree, some of them holding it, and surrounded by a group of men in suits and a uniformed soldier. Their gazes are disconnected. One child stares blankly, another looks off-camera, and a third turns toward the man holding a shovel outside of the camera’s view.

Let us now turn to the two photographs that record previous moments of the same event. It is important to draw attention to the gestures present in these. They speak of the visuality created around it – visuality we intend to highlight.

Figure 2
Mayor Sousa Lima at a ceremony during Tree Week, 1968
Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

Figure 2 shows the same three children. This time, however, they have their backs to the camera, all with their arms behind them and their heads bowed, looking toward the ground. The man holding the shovel appears this time beside them, also with his back to us, wearing a hat and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. One of the men is now holding the young tree. Next to him, another man’s hand holds a microphone close to his mouth. We understand that he is speaking, while the others listen. Behind the row of men in suits, where the speaker is also standing, several children try to catch a glimpse of what is happening in the foreground. Apparently, only those three were invited to the main event. Further in the background, the Military Police band seems to be waiting for the speech to end before starting to play the subsequent stage of the ceremony.

Figure 3
A ceremony during Tree Week, 1968
Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

In Figure 3, still with his back turned, the man who was holding the shovel in the previous photograph is no longer doing so. It is now in the hands of another man, wearing a suit, tie, buttoned sleeves, polished leather shoes, and slicked-back hair. He appears in profile, but his face is still visible and recognizable. The shovel is loaded with earth and hovering over a hole: the one dug for the young tree. More children have been called to the scene, and now three little hands hold the thin trunk until the roots are sufficiently covered with earth to secure it.

Putting these images together exposes a tension between the mayor’s performance—as he poses for the camera whilst placing the sapling in the hole—and the action itself, carried out by the workers. The man captured in the photograph seemingly planting the tree is not the one who actually planted it, but rather the one who posed to perform the act of planting. The scene is not about the tree, but how politicians use the commemorative day for political promotion. The scene is, ultimately, about the construction of its own image.

Figure 4
Selected photographs from the Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

Our reading of the archive subverts a more traditional gaze that focuses on the figures in the foreground—the state officials whose names are indexed and thus immortalized in the city’s official history. Instead, we redirect attention to the unnamed manual laborers who actually plant and tend to the saplings, and to the trees themselves. This analytical shift actively challenges the archive’s developmentalist ideology, which prioritizes the politician over act itself. The images, therefore, reveal not only the theatricality of the official narrative, but also the genuine relationship of care that lies hidden at its center. 

Figure 5
A sapling is planted in honor of Tree Week, 1965
Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

The Trees the Reports Erased

In addition to reassembling the images, we turned to headlines and reports that announce and, sometimes, denounce tree logging in Brazil.

Newspaper reports give a voice to local residents who have witnessed the systematic felling of these trees. It highlights the contrast between mayors planting trees on commemorative days and the way in which they manage the urban tree population, cutting down more trees than they plant.

A fragmented photograph (the second image in Fig. 6) reveals the irony inherent in the bureaucracy of care. In it, a hand holds a folded piece of paper, with an abandoned shovel on the ground, overlaid with a 2022 newspaper article that reports that 21 trees are felled every second in the Amazon.

In the digital version of our work, we overlay these images with journalistic headlines, which appear as the mouse cursor moves.

Artistic Reproduction: Assembling a New Archive

In response to the ironies undergirding this archive (whereby the politicians who systematically decimate forests choreograph tree-planting scenes), we developed the artwork Cidade Jardim (Garden City, 2025). The work amplifies the irony while calling for a more attentive gaze toward the trees inhabiting our urban environments.

Our work aims to restore what has been erased: earlier relationships between local residents and trees, the systematic removal of trees from cities, and how public policies actually operate. Through editing and montage, we divert these images from their original meaning, highlighting instead the artificiality of the documented scenes. We also identify the species of the trees in the images, reactivating the memory of their common names, such as Salgueiro, Ipê, Copaiba, etc.

Figure 6
Picture fragments from Garden City, by Duo Paisagens Móveis: Bárbara Lissa Campos and Maria Vaz, 2025.
Original pictures from Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte

By fragmenting the images and then reconstructing them, we produce evidence for new articulations. The scene that previously established a consistent narrative is now fragmented into traces that produce suspense and instability. The assembly does not intend to reconstruct a historical fact, but rather fabulates an immanent historicity, acknowledging the contradictions and conflicts already present in these images.

As the scenes of planting are dismantled, other scenes come together, forming a new narrative whole: an open grave, surrounded by witnesses; children with their arms behind their backs (as in police scenes involving arrests); microphones used to question a speaker; the act of smoking a cigarette, possibly confirming the tension involved.

Figure 7
Garden City, by Duo Paisagens Móveis: Bárbara Lissa and Maria Vaz, 2025

We include color images of species whose names are absent from the archives. These are dissonant with the black and white historical photographs.

We then added a final component: poetic texts, written by ourselves, that appear when the cursor is moved over the images. These texts are a different type of writing than the articles extracted from newspapers. It is neither tied to reality nor entirely fictional, but rather situated in an intermediate space, in a literary style that approaches the speculative fabulation. Speculative fabulation, a form of imaginative storytelling, is often used to construct modes of coexistence between humans and non-humans in times of ecological crisis.

In these texts, we think with trees, imagining their possible stories, and how we impact them and are impacted by them. We fabulate based on the specificities of each species, personal and collective experiences and desires, and other fables. 

In an exercise of imagination and storytelling, speculative fabulation is mainly associated with the construction of modes of coexistence between humans and non-humans in times of ecological crisis. Building on this, the project added a final component: the creation of poetic texts, written by ourselves. In these texts, we practice thinking with trees as a narrative focus, bringing their possible stories, and how we impact them and are impacted by them. We fabulate based on the specificities of each species, personal and collective experiences, desires, and also other fables. 

Thousands of years later, on a typically drizzly day and in the very spot where their ancestors encountered jaguars and agoutis, grew familiar with the Guarani, the Tupi, and the Guaianás, witnessed the rise of a tradition of invaders and felt the frenzied pulsating heart of wild “São Paulo,” a quaresmeira tree on Caramuru Street guided a lost child back home. 

—An excerpt from Garden City, by the duo Paisagens Móveis (Bárbara Lissa Campos and Maria Vaz)

In contrast to the journalistic and accusatory tone of news reports, our texts explore possible – and probable – interspecies relationships. In a tone that is sometimes utopian, sometimes apocalyptic, we point to a rupture between humans and plants in large urban centers. But here, it is the trees that are the agents, the transformative subjects.

Garden City thus highlights the paradox, irony, and theatricality of the relationship that local authorities maintain with trees, reduced to political symbols in metropolitan areas. Simultaneously, it highlights the subtle gestures of care—from the people who actually planted the trees and from ourselves, when we look closely at the images and the tree species—that are rarely evident in official archives. By engaging in a fabulative exercise, we propose a closer encounter: one that recognizes the names, species, physical traits, and potential stories of these trees, offering a renewed and closer mode of relating to them within large urban centers.

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Featured image: A sapling is planted in honor of Tree Week, 1965. Communication Advisory Collection, Public Archive of Belo Horizonte.

Bárbara Lissa and Maria Vaz have been working together since 2017 as the duo Paisagens Móveis. They explore the relationship between art and ecology, developing their projects through expanded field photography. Together, they have held several national and international exhibitions and published the photobooks ‘Óris,’ by Selo Tuvo (2023), and Três Momentos de um rio (2021).

Bárbara Lissa Campos is a visual artist and Ph.D. student in literary studies at Federal University of Minas Gerais (Pós-Lit / UFMG) / Brazil (CAPES / CAPES PDSE scholarship), with an exchange period at Durham University (UK). Contact.

Maria Figueiredo Vaz is a Visual artist and Ph.D. student in visual arts at Federal University of Minas Gerais (EBA / UFMG) / Brazil (CAPES / CAPES PDSE scholarship), with an exchange period at Freie Universität Berlin. Contact.