Entry Journal — 01 · Byron Gago · Milan 2017
MANONEGRA
A research project on oil extraction, territorial dispossession, and cultural erasure, tracing the architecture of a slow violence across the Ecuadorian Amazon.
scroll to enter01 — An Ecology of Extraction
What remains when a territory is treated as a resource.
MANONEGRA, The Rigidity of the Borders, is a photo-essay and ethnographic inquiry into the consequences of oil industrialisation in Ecuador's eastern Amazon. Conducted in October 2016 and developed in Milan in 2017, it documents the transformation of jungle into infrastructure, of community into workforce, and of culture into folklore.
The title draws from two registers: the physical (the blackened hand of the oil worker) and the geopolitical, referencing the opacity of a system in which state, corporation, and missionary institution move as a single body, against a population that was never invited.
This is not a project about oil. It is a project about what oil makes possible: the reorganisation of space, the reassignment of identity, and the slow dissolution of a way of life that had no word for border.
Approximately 500,000 people inhabit the eastern region: among them, 13 distinct indigenous nationalities whose territorial knowledge predates the Ecuadorian state by centuries.
02 — Hybrid Ethnographic Research
The dust on the lens is part of the method.
The fieldwork was carried out over three weeks in October 2016, moving between Lago Agrio, Coca, and the Tigüino corridor in Pastaza province. The research did not begin from neutrality. It began from a declared position: a Latin American researcher formed in Europe, returning to a region whose extraction had financed the continent's modernity.
The methodology is what I call hybrid ethnographic research: a deliberate fusion of documentary photography, ethnographic observation, informal oral testimony, and critical analysis of institutional documents. It borrows from journalism without submitting to its demand for events, and from anthropology without pretending to its claim on distance.
All testimonies were gathered with verbal consent and full awareness of the project's scope. In several cases, subjects declined to speak on record, a refusal I treated not as obstruction but as data.
Distribution, Archive, Interface
The research is structured across three display registers: the printed volume, this web interface, and the exhibition format. Each register carries different affordances: the book holds the argument in sequence; the web allows non-linear re-entry; the exhibition suspends the viewer in duration.
A digital archive is being constructed to house photographic sequences, extracted institutional documents, and recordings from oral testimonies. The archive is designed not as a repository but as a site of friction, where official language meets lived memory and does not resolve.
Interpretation does not precede the material. It emerges from repeated, retroactive contact with it: cyclical, never conclusive.
Chapter 03
A Continent
Divided
Into Blocks
The oil block is the fundamental unit of the new Amazon geography: a corporate cartography superimposed on state maps and indigenous territory alike, sharing no common points with either.
03 — Three Superimposed Maps
The block is not a place. It is a claim.
The cartography of the concession blocks produces a geographic map divided into parcels of approximately 200,000 hectares each, delineated strictly by longitude and latitude. This cartography is entirely anachronistic and alien both to the state maps that represent the territory and, more fundamentally, to the unwritten spatial knowledge that has governed indigenous movement for generations.
What results is a superimposition of three different maps: state, corporate, and indigenous. They share no common points. They speak no common language. This incommunicability is not incidental. It is structural, and it is the condition that makes dispossession possible.
By 1986, operations had expanded south into UNESCO-protected areas. The government modified the laws protecting reserved zones and, in a gesture of administrative audacity, redrew the boundaries of Yasuní National Park itself.
04 — The Same Logic, Five Centuries Apart
Neoconquistadors.
The term is not metaphor. It names a structural continuity between those who arrived in the fifteenth century under the cross and the crown, and those who arrived in the twentieth century under the corporate logo and the government decree. The methods differ in legality, not in logic.
In both cases: exploration precedes occupation; religious conversion precedes legal absorption; the absence of the invitation is compensated by the declaration of sovereignty over what was not asked for. Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote in 1519: "We came to serve God, the King, and also to enrich ourselves." The three-part motivation (theological, political, economic) has not been retired. It has been institutionalised.
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1950s
Initial oil expeditions in the southern Amazon. Southern communities (Kichwa, Sarayaku, Shuar, Achuar) resist. Northern communities (Huaorani, Siona, Cofán) are targeted instead: classified as non-warlike, accessible.
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1960s–70s
Missionaries, using aircraft provided by Texaco, locate dispersed Huaorani families. Communities concentrated into restricted settlements. Catechisation precedes, and enables, extraction.
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1972
Oil becomes the primary axis of Ecuador's national economy. A petro-dependency is inaugurated that will shape every subsequent political decision about the eastern region.
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1981
Collapse of global oil prices. Ecuador opens its territory to foreign multinationals. Blocks are assigned. The map is redrawn in corporate geometry.
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1986
Construction begins in protected zones. Yasuní's boundaries are legally modified. A new discourse of "responsible extraction" and "cutting-edge technology" emerges, a rhetorical displacement designed to neutralise objection.
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1996–2016
Block 16 (Repsol/Yasuní) prohibits access without corporate authorisation. A private company exercises territorial sovereignty within a UNESCO-protected national park. The territory is illegal, to the communities who have always lived there.
The term I use, programmed ethnocide, follows Robert Jaulin's 1970 definition: the deliberate destruction of a culture's conditions of reproduction, without necessarily exterminating its members physically. It is destruction that works through architecture, law, language policy, and the organisation of space.
"We came to serve God, the King, and also to enrich ourselves."
05 — Recursos que construyen felicidad
The slogan that does not name its beneficiaries.
Recursos que construyen felicidad (Resources that build happiness) is the slogan of Ecuador Estratégico, the public body established in 2011 to manage the infrastructural consequences of the oil concessions. It appears on the institution's website and on billboards erected across the communities whose territory has been ceded.
The analysis of this slogan is not pedantic. It is diagnostic. The phrase performs a universalisation ("from all, for all") that erases the asymmetry between those who extract and those who are extracted from. It positions technological backwardness as the obstacle to happiness, recruiting positivist progress ideology to do the work that coercion once did openly.
In 2011, the Plan de Desarrollo was renamed the Plan de Ecodesarrollo. The prefix changed. The drilling did not. The reformulation is institutional greenwashing: the semantic frame shifts while the practice remains.
Ecuador Estratégico translated its bulletins into four indigenous languages: PAAI COCA, KICHWA, TEDEDO, SHUAR. The translations contained no procedural information. No figures. No names. No accountability.
The institution produced no participatory mechanisms. ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples (2007) both establish the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. Neither was observed. The translation of bulletins served as its substitute.
The Architecture of Consent
The infrastructure built by Ecuador Estratégico (roads connecting remote centres, bridges, schools, residential comunas) is real. The question is not whether it was built, but for whom, by whom, and under what terms. Roads are useful for oil trucks as well as for communities. The simultaneity of benefit and dispossession is not contradiction. It is design.
Each infrastructure project entered without consultation, modified without consent, named without acknowledgement. The comunas, recognised legally for the first time in 1937, were designated "peasant settlements", a classification that denied indigenous identity in order to create a national proletariat compatible with the modernisation project.
Sovereignty by Omission
The recognition of indigenous legal personality in 1998, the first genuine acknowledgement in Ecuadorian law, was not followed by the transfer of land titles. Communities gained a legal existence without gaining territorial security. The ilegalidad del territorio was formally declared by Alicia Cahsilla, president of the NAUE, before the National Assembly in 2016. Fifty years after the first Texaco drilling, the Huaorani still hold no property title to the land on which they live.
This is not bureaucratic delay. It is a permanent control mechanism: territorial illegality keeps communities in juridical precariousness, available for displacement whenever the next concession requires it.
Chapter 06
A Community
Confined,
Observed.
The Huaorani comune of Bataboro, Pastaza province (visited daily across three weeks in October 2016) sits inside the Petrobell operational perimeter. To reach it, you pass a checkpoint. The barrier is mechanical. The authorisation is corporate.
06 — Bataboro, Tigüino
What the architecture says when no one is speaking.
The houses built by Ecuador Estratégico inside the Bataboro comune are single-storey cement-and-metal-sheet constructions, distributed without urban logic. They replace the onco, taloca, and cuya: traditional dwellings of wood and palm, sized to the domestic group, porous to the climate they were built within. The new houses are impermeable to everything except heat. Under the equatorial sun, the corrugated metal roofs become uninhabitable.
This is not incompetence. Colonial architecture that degrades living conditions forces dependency: communities that cannot sustain themselves within their territory become available for incorporation into the cash economy that the oil infrastructure produces.
Food security has collapsed. Light pollution, noise, and chemical contamination compromise the habitat of the species the Huaorani have cultivated knowledge of over generations. The prohibition on free movement (the checkpoints, the controlled access, the reduction of usable territory) makes self-sufficient cycles unsustainable.
The Commercialisation of Identity
What is presented externally as cultural preservation (the Huaorani in traditional dress at public events, carrying spears, wearing feather crowns) is a strategic image managed in coordination with corporate and government interests. It produces a reassuring exoticism: the culture appears intact, the community appears content, the extraction appears compatible with coexistence.
The folklore-isation of identity is not the community's choice. It is the residue that extractivism leaves when it cannot fully erase what it has displaced: a performative remnant, mobilised as proof of harmony.
Silence as Epistemic Sovereignty
Following the cumulative ruptures of dispossession, some members of the comune developed what I observed as a deliberate silence, a refusal of verbal communication with outsiders. This is not shyness or hostility. It is a strategy: the protection of ritual knowledge, oral history, and collective memory from the instrumentalisation of the external gaze.
The Huaorani language is not only a vehicle for daily communication. It is the medium through which territorial knowledge, spiritual practice, and collective identity are transmitted. Its containment is an act of cultural self-defense against a system that has consistently extracted, misrepresented, and commercially deployed what it touches.
Silence, here, is not absence. It is the most disciplined form of sovereignty remaining.
07 — Doubt as a Structural Method
Using this depression as a spectacularising form.
The title of this final section names its own risk. To document suffering is to handle it, and handling always risks contamination: by aestheticisation, by the demand of the global market for legible tragedy, by the researcher's own desire for coherence. I offer no solution to this. I offer it as a condition that must remain visible within the work.
The research aims to interpret and render, with the highest possible degree of available objectivity, what emerged from the field, tracing the origins of transformation rather than simply recording its surface. Doubt is not a failure of method. It is the method: it prevents interpretation from hardening into position, and it keeps the work open to what it did not anticipate.
I conceive of myself in this work as both instrument and medium: a body that has moved through the territory, that has been seen as well as seen, that has absorbed and been absorbed. Every selection I made (of subject, angle, caption, inclusion, exclusion) carries the imprint of that position. To deny it would be to falsify the work. To display it is the least I can offer in exchange for the access I was given.
The conceptual categories generated by this research are not conclusions. They are lenses: made available for the viewer to use, to refuse, to revise. Knowledge that does not acknowledge its conditions of production produces only authority.
The surplus of information available about the Ecuadorian Amazon (corporate reports, government bulletins, NGO documentation, journalistic coverage) converges on a homogeneity of frame that flattens the local into the legible. The task of this project is to refuse that flattening: to insist on the granular, the contradictory, the untranslatable.
"What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to."
08 — 7500+ / After the Oil
More than seven thousand kilometres of pipeline. One continuous logic.
The 7500+ notation, referencing the approximate longitudinal length of South America, frames the project's final section: the recognition that what has been documented in Ecuador is not local. It is a systemic pattern replicated across every Amazonian state, from Venezuela to Bolivia, wherever a concession block has been drawn and a community has been reclassified as an obstacle.
The pipelines form what I call a vascular district of a parasitic organic mechanism, a network that reads the continent as a body to be drained, running infrastructure across political borders that mean nothing to the extraction economy while remaining absolute barriers for the people who live along them.
Mango and Prostitutes — An Illusion of Modernity
El Coca (renamed Puerto Francisco de Orellana after the Spanish conquistador, erasing the Huaorani name) is the paradigmatic city of the extractivist frontier: 40,000 inhabitants, an airport, fifteen hotels, five tourism agencies, and nightclubs that function as brothels during the day. The city was not planned. It was produced: by the labour demand of the oil infrastructure, by the salary differential that drew workers from the highlands and the coast, and by the absence of any institutional framework other than the company that controlled the territory.
The hospital that Texaco built was built for its expatriate staff, not for the region's population. It was, however, a source of pride, and of the trust required for further territorial expansion. Infrastructure as instrument of consent.
Bataboro 2014 — Evidence of Incommunicability
In 2014, during construction works inside Bataboro authorised by Ecuador Estratégico, violations of community internal law occurred, including the sexual assault of young Huaorani women. The community's warriors, acting within their own legal framework, killed two Ecuador Estratégico employees and wounded a third.
The Minister of the Interior, José Serrano, responded: "Es una comunidad totalmente contactada. Es un hecho aislado." The violations that preceded the killings were not investigated. The killings were criminalised. The phrase totalmente contactada ("fully contacted") performs a legal absorption: once a community is declared contacted, it becomes subject to national law and loses the protection of its own codes, regardless of whether that contact was sought or imposed.
References
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Entry Journal — 01
MANONEGRA
Byron Gago · Milan 2017 · ECAL MA Visual Arts