Amazon Frontiers proposes to research, document, and narrate the intense spatial transformations currently unfolding in the Amazon. Because it is a territory of central importance for global climate regulation and, simultaneously, a region that contains large reserves of raw materials that are being integrated into the world-market, the geographic dynamics of the Amazon poses the most urgent challenges for spatial practice and thinking. Yet the Amazon is still largely marginal inside the fields and forums of urban culture. This project seeks to bridge that gap by asking what we can "learn from" the spatial arrangements historically inscribe in and projected to this vast ecology at a moment when Latin America is experiencing a process of rapid economic growth and urbanization that directly affects the region. Based on archival research and in-depth fieldwork, Amazon Frontiers will investigate the disruptions and connections between spatial economies of preservation and extraction around which contemporary frontier lines oscillate.

Paulo Tavares is an architect and urbanist in London and São Paulo. He has taught at the London Metropolitan University, at the Visual Cultures Lab/MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, and currently teaches in their MA program at the Centre for Research Architecture. Parallel to his activities as a researcher/architect, Tavares has been involved with many autonomous media practices since late 1990s, and as a result of it, his practice explores architecture, media-based narratives, and writing as interconnected modalities of reading urban, territorial, and ecological conditions. Articles had appeared in many publications worldwide including Nada (PT), Alfabeta2 and Abitare (IT), Cabinet (US), and Piseagrama (BR), and his work has been shown in venues such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and Portikus, Frankfurt