Banca de DEFESA: CAROLINA GUIDA TEIXEIRA

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : CAROLINA GUIDA TEIXEIRA
DATE: 17/04/2026
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: sala de videoconferência
TITLE:

Crystals of São Francisco: Fractures by Sobradinho and Itaparica in the cycles of matter and memory

KEY WORDS:

History of Urban and Regional Planning; Territory; Infrastructure; Hydroelectric Power Plants; Dam Cities; New Cities.

PAGES: 450
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Arquitetura e Urbanismo
SUMMARY:

The crash that heralded the end of entire worlds in the São Francisco Valley did not come from the sky, but from the inexorable advance of the waters that devoured the landscape to fulfill their promise of “redemption”. For centuries, the river’s permanence in the heart of the semi-arid region shaped a civilizational bed that attracted communities and consolidated cities; from the 1970s onwards, however, the very waters that had founded them began to submerge them. With the rising energy demands of industrial centers, the hinterland was converted into a “sacrifice zone.” The “Drought Polygon” – stigmatized as a “problem region” – provided the political legitimacy for the construction of successive concrete walls that sank entire cities. This gesture is inscribed in the Capitalocene – a moment when the river is converted into a commodity and the basin into a field of expropriation – with the Sobradinho (1979) and Itaparica (1988) power plants as its emblems, resulting in the submersion of seven urban centers and the displacement of approximately 137,000 people. By chaining the Velho Chico, such engineering stemmed the pulse of the floods and ebbs, establishing a temporality that, like the river, became paralyzed. In this suspended time, the repressed experience of inhabiting only the past begins to continuously strain the present. Through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s “crystal image” and Henri Bergson’s “duration,” this research investigates the circularity of a territory split by dams, where matter and memory return, configuring the rift between a virtually intact past and a materially fractured present.This rupture unfolds across four fractures: the environmental, in which the ancestral symbiosis between river, land, and man returns as a necrophagous circuit; the social, in which the state’s promise of progress and light is refracted into exile and reappears as “waiting”; the material, where new cities rise from the rubble of the old; and the memorial, in which the crack in the territory concentrates the fissure of trauma. Methodologically, the work combines history, urbanism, and sociology through critical cartography and a mosaic of voices (2021-2024). Beyond physical erasure, the research unveils a landscape of insistence where nothing has a beginning or an end; when the flood occurs from within, through the cracks opened by development, the dam overflows and life insists on sprouting – making death the substrate that sustains the eternal return of existence.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interno - 1083498 - CARLOS HENRIQUE MAGALHAES DE LIMA
Interna - 1855707 - CAROLINA PESCATORI CANDIDO DA SILVA
Presidente - 1374229 - RICARDO TREVISAN
Externa à Instituição - RITA DE CASSIA LUCENA VELLOSO - UFMG