Frontier Infrastructures

Frontier infrastructures’ is an ethnographic film about the material, affective and moral relationship between humans and transport infrastructures in the Colombian Amazon. These infrastructures have played a vital role in the region’s history and geography. They have long allowed movement of people, goods, and ideas; shaped colonization and settlement processes throughout the region; and
transformed its landscape in significant ways. Moreover, they hold promises and desires of connectivity, inclusion and belonging. The hazardous, fragile, and often ruinous nature of many of those infrastructures, however, has turned them into pervasive symbols of abandonment, isolation and neglect. Such infrastructures are often perceived by people as material embodiments of their historical and geographical condition of frontier, and habitually elicit feelings of
exclusion from modernity, development and the state. This emotional and moral dimension of infrastructure forms the basis of this project. Specifically, the film follows different persons in their everyday journeys across various man-made and natural infrastructures (roads, rivers, trails) in order to explore and interrogate the different ways in which they make sense of their past, present, and possible futures through the perceived and lived realities that such
infrastructures embody or symbolize.