23 south; Retracing the Peabiru Footpaths Through a visual-cartographic exploration of the Raposo Tavares highway

This presentation draws on a work-in-progress, practice-based PhD examining the transformation of the Brazilian hinterland along the 23º latitude axis, from the Atlantic to the Andes. Once the Peabirú Indigenous footpaths central to Guarani cosmology, these routes were erased under colonial expansion and are now overlaid by highways facilitating resource extraction, including the Raposo Tavares Highway connecting Santos, Latin America’s largest port, to Bolivia’s Potosí mines. Using critical cartography, embodied practice, and visual methodologies, the project investigates this corridor as an ‘extractive zone,’ revealing the ‘submerged perspectives’ described by Gómez-Barris. Through photographic and film-based work in progress, it explores how landscapes might be reimagined—not as extractable objects, but as interconnected subjects—and considers how decolonized cartographic approaches can restore fragmented geographies and re-inscribe the Peabirú paths into contemporary discourse.

Eleonora Aronis is a CHASE-funded PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a background in architecture and visual arts.…