Suppressed Temporalities: Urban Dismantling and Virtual Reconstruction as a Memory Device at Morro de Santo Antônio

Abstract

This article examines the dismantlings of Morro de Santo Antônio, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, as an operation that not only removes matter but also suppresses the temporal and symbolic layers embedded in the urban landscape. Drawing on the articulation between regimes of historicity (HARTOG, 2013), the experience/expectation pair (KOSELLECK, 2006), the critique of acceleration and detemporalization (HAN, 2016), the legibility of the city (LYNCH, 1960), and the allegory of heritage (CHOAY, 2001), the dismantling is interpreted as an act of temporal politics: a gesture that collapses the past in order to free the present from its obligations to memory. In dialogue with the London Charter (2009), a geometric-expographic model of the hill developed in the Unreal Engine game engine, within the scope of master’s research, is presented, reconstructing virtually what the city has removed. It is argued that digital reconstruction, when grounded in documentary rigor, operates less as restitution and more as counter-narrative — a critical device of memory capable of restoring to urban space the temporalities that have been subtracted from it.