Maurício Meirelles: Digging Deeper into the Land - A Cultural Approach to a Former Mining site in Minas Gerais, Brazil

The mining exploration of the Brazilian hinterland which took place during the 18th century was a socioeconomic and cultural process that had deep meaning for the country’s formation. On the one hand, the frantic economic activity made it possible for a sophisticated urban culture to flourish in the mining region (the present state of Minas Gerais). On the other, this activity set in motion a permanent mechanism of environmental destruction and social exclusion through slavery, the impacts of which continue to affect local ecosystems today and also, in a structural manner, the whole of Brazilian society.

This broad process is metaphorically narrated in the Águas Claras Mine Future Use Project, conducted by the author in a former mining site in the vicinity of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, a city located near one of the largest iron ore production areas in the world. Through the concept of cultural landscape, the lecture aims to investigate the impacts of the mining industry in Minas Gerais, both on its physical and immaterial dimensions, and proposes possible ways to address related questions in the context of present ecological practices.

Maurício Meirelles (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1967) is an architect, fiction writer, and editor. The author has published the books A Cidadela (Miguilim Publishers: Belo Horizonte, 2019) and Birigüi (Miguilim Publishers: Belo Horizonte, 2016), the latter short-listed for the 59th Jabuti Award (Brazil, 2017), Brazil’s most important literary prize. Meirelles has had short stories and essays published in Brazilian lThe Ecologies of Care 2022 lecture series is organized by Elke Krasny at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in collaboration with Urška Jurman at the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in Ljubljana, Inês Moreira at Lab2PT – EAAD at the University of Minho, and Fluid Circulations, curated by Nada Rosa Schroer and Nina Paszkowski in Cologne.iterary magazines and abroad. He is a founding editor of the Olympio Literary and Arts Magazine published in Brazil.

The Ecologies of Care 2022 lecture series is organized by Elke Krasny at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in collaboration with Urška Jurman at the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in Ljubljana, Inês Moreira at Lab2PT – EAAD at the University of Minho, and Fluid Circulations, curated by Nada Rosa Schroer and Nina Paszkowski in Cologne.