On Thursday, November 5, 2026, Lucas Gervilla from Universität Rostock will join us for a guest lecture!
Lucas Gervilla is a Brazilian researcher, visual artist and filmmaker based in Germany. He holds a PhD in Arts from São Paulo State University (UNESP) and completed research stays at the Berlin University of the Arts and the University of Greifswald with DAAD support. His work explores place, memory and counter-narratives of progress through theoretical research, fieldwork and audiovisual practice. He previously taught at the University of Rostock and currently works in museum education at the LWL-Museum Hellerlecht in Detmold.
He will present his Postdoc project on „Tales from the Mining Land: Place and Belonging in the Brazilian Anthropocene“
This project investigates how communities affected by the tailings dam disasters of Bento Rodrigues (2015) and Brumadinho (2019), in Minas Gerais, Brazil, reconfigure their spatial and affective relations to place after radical territorial transformations. Rather than approaching the disasters primarily through their ruins or environmental destruction, the project focuses on what continues after rupture: memories, everyday practices, forms of belonging and expectations for the future.
The research builds on preliminary fieldwork conducted in the region between 2021 and 2022 and on previous work on abandoned places, ruins and memory. These experiences gradually shifted the focus from the material remains of disaster to the persistence and transformation of relationships with places that can no longer be inhabited or practiced in the same way.
Drawing on contemporary debates on place, belonging and spatial relations, alongside critical perspectives on extractivism, the Anthropocene and (post)coloniality, the project asks how relationships to place persist, change or are renegotiated when the material conditions that once sustained them are profoundly altered.
MP2