This project examines the colonial plantation as both an architectural form and a set of everyday practices whose afterlives shaped modern architecture in Brazil. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s dialectic of the “plantation” and “the plot” (1971), the project conceptualizes plantations as networks of spatial and social practices that produced both domination and insurgency, and that endured in practices of climate adaptation, agricultural management, and cultural memory. Tracing how embodied routines of care, labor, and ritual generated alternative geographies, the project complicates the canonical “big house”/“slave quarters” dichotomy by analyzing other sites—the terreiro (ritual grounds), the roça (provision gardens), the quilombo (maroon community), as well as everyday spaces in-between.

Foregrounding the practices of enslaved women, the project argues that botanical, reproductive, and domestic practices functioned as counter-plantation insurgent strategies, challenging Brazil’s national mythology of racial harmony. Figures such as the ama de leite (wet nurse) can be reinterpreted as spatial intermediaries whose bodily practices negotiated the boundaries of servitude, intimacy, and refusal. Adopting maroon scholarship praxis (Nascimento, Gonzalez, Ferreira da Silva), this project combines critiques of liberal multiculturalism with embodied archival practices grounded in Black feminist theory. It theorizes the quilombo (maroon community) as a multi-sited Black practice—real and imagined—that both countered the plantation and modeled alternative futurities. In this way, the project repositions practice not simply as repetition but as epistemology: at once the instrument of domination and the medium of insurgent world-making.