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Heat, Humidity, Rain & Mud: The Materialities of Working and Wearing on the Devil's Railroad

Kutesko, Elizabeth (2023) Heat, Humidity, Rain & Mud: The Materialities of Working and Wearing on the Devil's Railroad. In: Earth, Water, Air, Fire: The Four Elements of Fashion, 16-17 March 2024, Università Iuav di Venezia.

Type of Research: Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item
Creators: Kutesko, Elizabeth
Description:

This paper takes as its starting point a photographic archive that was deliberately destroyed by fire in 1980, an action that was not uncommon during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 – 1985) and one which has contributed to, as contemporary artist Rosângela Rennó articulates, ‘a certain ‘historical amnesia’’ within Brazil (Rennó 2022). The analysis is concerned with bringing into focus the precarious remains of that archive, which contains New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill’s (1877-?) photographs documenting the unknown global workforce who constructed the 366 kilometer (224 mile) Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon between 1907 and 1912. Nicknamed the ‘Devil’s Railroad’, due to the vast numbers of workers who died from a catalogue of disaster and disease, the railroad was an American-Brazilian venture intended to expedite the global exportation of rubber and other tropical commodities from landlocked Bolivia. The workers were exposed to all the elements, while responsible for the hard manual labour of culling the jungle, laying the tracks, building bridges and maintaining the right of way. Given the considerable dearth of everyday and working dress preserved in museum collections in the U.S. and Brazil, this paper uses poetry, diary extracts and memoirs to breathe life into the visual and thus make up for the absences left by the deliberate destruction of the archive and the histories that are left untold. Personal accounts of life in frontier societies such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad and Panama Canal facilitate our understanding of the embodied and experiential memories of wearing, working and caring for clothes when exposed to extreme heat, humidity, rain and mud, but also highlight how salient aspects of dress were for social distinction and identity construction in the remote geographical location.

Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > Central Saint Martins
Date: 16 March 2023
Event Location: Università Iuav di Venezia
Date Deposited: 27 Jan 2025 10:11
Last Modified: 27 Jan 2025 10:11
Item ID: 23317
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23317

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