At the interface: Bloody Spectacles and Necro-Surveillance in Rio de Janeiro with Professor Lucia Cantero

On October 28th 2025, residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Northern favelas (Complexo da Penha e Complexo de Alemão) witnessed one of the deadliest massacres in their nation’s history. Launched by the state, “operation containment” sought to mitigate the Comando Vermelho’s criminal network at the cost of 130 plus lives. Forensics revealed the targets of the visceral bloodbath were not only racialized (mostly black and brown residents) but also largely a product of summary style executions, and not the casualties of combat wounds. What does this public spectacle demonstrate about the state of ‘order and progress’ in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil today? At a time when social media and other digital intimacies have heightened bodily knowledge through biometric management, how have increased police surveillance and other forms of technologies (like facial recognition software) led to such rampant and violent “inefficiencies”?

In this lecture, Lucia Cantero will explore “necro-surveillance” and other emergent tech contradictions that draw from her monograph in progress Olympic Afterlives: Global Spectacles of Design and Dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. This book project examines the afterlife of the Rio 2016 Olympics, and the ways the mega-event reshaped policy and practices on the ground to consider the contemporary “interface” of urban subjectivity in Rio de Janeiro today.