Archives are never simply records. They are dense with time—stratified, discontinuous, shot through with presence and absence. When the archive in question is a photographic and video collection made across a decade of fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, it carries something more: the layered entanglement of urban life and nature, captured at the edges of a rapidly transforming territory, in images that refuse to settle into documentation alone.

This workshop departs from exactly such an archive, assembled by Professor Roberto Monte-Mór during his research on urbanisation in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1980s and 1990s, and from the sustained inquiry that Brazilian researcher Junia Mortimer has been conducting within it. Mortimer’s practice mobilises sensorial methodologies and visual art to move through the collection’s multiple temporalities, spaces, and registers: the bodily, the ecological, the architectural, the social. The result is a way of inhabiting it, of letting its images speak across time about what extended urbanisation looks, feels, and sounds like from within.

What emerges across these conversations is a shared proposition that extended urbanisation cannot be grasped through abstraction alone. It demands attention to multiplicity of times, of spaces, of sensorial registers and to art and image as irreplaceable forms of urban knowledge.

This is the first occasion on which Roberto Monte-Mór and Junia Mortimer present together on this body of work. A small exhibition of photographic prints from the archive will be on display in the DiD Lab and Monte-Mór and Mortimer’s image-based book produced from the research “Arquivo Urbano Natureza” (Urban Nature Archives), in both Portuguese and English, will be available for purchase after the event. The presentations and discussions will be moderated by Christian Schmid and followed by an apèro.

Roberto Monte-Mór is Professor at the School of Economic Sciences and the School of Architecture, Federal University of Minas Gerais. He carried out pioneering research on Amazonia and coined the term “extended urbanisation.” Junia Mortimer is Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow 2025–2026 at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

The research is funded by Urban Studies Foundation Event coordinated by Nancy Couling (Architecture of Territory, ETH Zurich) and Nitin Bathla (UZH).