The Last Adventure

The Last Adventure (A Última Aventura) reveals the approximately one month journey that Romy Pocztaruk undertook on the Transamazonic Road on October 2011. Traveling by car sections of the almost four thousand kilometers highway, Pocztaruk searched for material and symbolic evidence remaining from a pharaonic, utopic, boastful project which quickly faded into oblivion and abandonment. The outcome are static images of empty, unpopulated scenarios, where the absent dwellers keep the vestiges of their adventures. The Transamazonic Road, whose construction began during the military government of Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969-1974), had been originally designed to longitudinally link the North and Northeast regions of the nation, reaching from the extreme East of Paraíba to the border of Amazonas with Peru. The offspring of a political strategy nurtured by the dictatorship during the so-called Brazilian “economic miracle”, the implementation of the road symbolized the possibility of national colonization and integration, advancing a large and modern Brazil into the status of a world power. This strongly nationalistic agenda, however, disguised not only the madness of the project, which was abandoned unfinished, but also the increasing military repression, which was at its direst.