The dam collapse in Brumadinho shocked Brazil and the world because of its tragic scale, but also because it is an event that leaves and reveals deep marks on our cultural experience.
The records made by residents and survivors—videos, photographs and testimonies, widely shared on social networks—turned us into witnesses to an environmental crime that reached catastrophic proportions.
Unlike ruins, which project into the future a return to a past that may never have occurred, the image of catastrophe anticipates. It is a warning, an alarm. It exceeds nature’s measure and transcends the human scale. Ruins are local; catastrophe is planetary.
We cannot fail to mention that we are discussing a tragic accident that follows another, very recent one, which occurred just three years ago in Mariana…
Mariana and the National Museum
I fear something similar to what happened with the National Museum. Mourned endlessly in the first days, it was very quickly forgotten by the news and the conversations that had swept the country. For a week, we were inundated with images of the two-hundred-year-old palace that housed it, burning and succumbing to the fury of the flames.
Yet the general tone of dismay over the loss of an invaluable heritage of 20 million items—the world’s fifth-largest museum collection—could not conceal a certain structural hypocrisy. Amid the collective lament, it emerged that while the museum was open, it had been virtually unknown to the public.
In other words, forgetting Mariana reveals not only the weakness of our environmental policies, but also the fragility of our collective memory and social responsibility. We urgently need to reassess environmental licenses and create measures that protect the population and biodiversity, but we cannot shirk the preservation of the memory of these traumatic events. Otherwise, all that will remain is room for catastrophe, which in the twenty-first century may have no aftermath.