A Knife All Blade – PhMuseum

A Knife All Blade recontextualises archival imagery of Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) inside The Hague’s city panorama, analyzing the persistence of colonial illustration and energy in structure and on a regular basis area.

A Knife All Blade is a long-term visible analysis and photographic undertaking by Brazilian artist Rafael Roncato, developed over 5 years whereas dwelling in The Hague, the Netherlands (2020–2025). The undertaking investigates the enduring colonial legacy of Dutch Brazil, a short but economically and symbolically decisive occupation of northeast Brazil by the Dutch West India Company (1630–1654), by re-editing and re-examining its colonial visible archive inside the modern city material of the Netherlands.

Drawing from collections held by the Dutch National Archives, the Mauritshuis, and the Rijksmuseum, Roncato reappropriates colonial-era work, maps, and paperwork initially produced to border Brazil as unique, fertile, and conquerable, integral to the visible financial system of the Dutch Golden Age. These commissioned photos, together with works by artists similar to Frans Post and Albert Eckhout and promoted beneath the governance of John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, are approached as aesthetic devices of empire and private legacy moderately than impartial historic data.

Through collage, juxtaposition, and a mix of analogue and digital pictures, Roncato fractures these historic representations and re-inserts them into modern scenes of The Hague. Architectural particulars, ignored city websites, and on a regular basis façades change into phases the place colonial traces persist subtly, embedded within the metropolis’s materials and visible constructions.

The undertaking connects historic propaganda and paperwork to the current metropolis, questioning how visible energy operates by means of framing, omission, and repetition. Inspired by João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poem “Uma faca só lâmina,” which lends the undertaking its title, every picture features as a “cut”: a metaphor for inflexible narratives that wound by insisting on singular, painful truths.

Combining archival analysis with private remark, A Knife All Blade provides a counter-reading of the Dutch city panorama from a diasporic perspective. In collaboration with researcher Carolina Monteiro, the undertaking culminated within the e-book The Façade, printed by Nest, which consolidates a brand new perspective into an editorial kind and proposes pictures as a instrument to show, query, and re-edit inherited histories embedded in public area.