Tropical Trauma Misery Tour by Rafael Roncato

Tropical Trauma Misery Tour dissects Bolsonaro’s 2018 stabbing as a Brazilian media farce. Blending documentary, theatre, memes, and pulp aesthetics, it reveals how digital populism distorts truth through spectacle, network propaganda, and chaos.

How does a knife attack become a turning point in a nation’s political history—and a blueprint for global right-wing propaganda?

In Tropical Trauma Misery Tour, Brazilian artist and editor Rafael Roncato reconstructs the 2018 stabbing of presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro—not as a crime, but as theatre. The book unravels the incident as a media performance, drawing connections between spectacle, populism, and the weaponisation of misinformation in Brazil’s recent history. Through more than 300 pages of photographs, screenshots, manipulated imagery, and facsimile documents, Roncato meticulously traces the visual rhetoric of political manipulation and how Brazil became a laboratory for a global digital strategy.

Structured as a two-act play, the photobook examines the event through forensic scrutiny, building a fragmented yet coherent visual essay about how staged politics, network propaganda, and the aesthetics of victimhood became the most powerful political tools in the contemporary far right’s arsenal.

“It’s a hallucinatory, stunning mix of document and parody. Tropical Trauma Misery Tour is not only about Brazil—it is Brazil as a mirror for everywhere else.”— Nearest Truth Podcast, Episode 448

The book highlights Bolsonaro’s case as part of a larger networked phenomenon, drawing parallels with events like the January 6 Capitol insurrection in the United States. Both episodes rely on conspiracy, virality, and visual myth-making. Roncato’s work shows how the Brazilian extreme right, like Trump’s MAGA movement, relied on memes, live broadcasts, misinformation, and affective spectacle to hijack democratic discourse and reframe facts into tribal belief.

In this way, Tropical Trauma Misery Tour does not only document a nation in crisis. It offers a methodology for reading the global rights playbook: weaponising victimhood, staging chaos, and using digital networks to manufacture “truth.

“Roncato's project is an anti-fiction, a meta-fiction firmly rooted in reality - and an inspiring example of a contemporary strategy of artistic enlightenment driven by sense and sensuality.” — Andreas Müller-Pohle

“A must-see for those seeking a visual journey into the heart of contemporary Brazilian political discourse, and for other countries that are contagiously impacted by this powerful farce.”—Ângela Berlinde