A Knife All Blade

A Knife All Blade recontextualises archival imagery of Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) within The Hague’s urban landscape, examining the persistence of colonial representation and power in architecture and everyday space.

A Knife All Blade is a long-term visual research and photographic project by Brazilian artist Rafael Roncato, developed over five years while living in The Hague, the Netherlands (2020–2025). The project investigates the enduring colonial legacy of Dutch Brazil, a brief yet economically and symbolically decisive occupation of northeast Brazil by the Dutch West India Company (1630–1654), by re-editing and re-examining its colonial visual archive within the contemporary urban fabric of the Netherlands.

Drawing from collections held by the Dutch National Archives, the Mauritshuis, and the Rijksmuseum, Roncato reappropriates colonial-era paintings, maps, and documents originally produced to frame Brazil as exotic, fertile, and conquerable, integral to the visual economy of the Dutch Golden Age. These commissioned images, including works by artists such as Frans Post and Albert Eckhout and promoted under the governance of John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, are approached as aesthetic instruments of empire and personal legacy rather than neutral historical records.

Through collage, juxtaposition, and a combination of analogue and digital photography, Roncato fractures these historical representations and re-inserts them into contemporary scenes of The Hague. Architectural details, overlooked urban sites, and everyday façades become stages where colonial traces persist subtly, embedded in the city’s material and visual structures.

The project connects historical propaganda and documents to the present city, questioning how visual power operates through framing, omission, and repetition. Inspired by João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poem “Uma faca só lâmina,” which lends the project its title, each image functions as a “cut”: a metaphor for rigid narratives that wound by insisting on singular, painful truths.

Combining archival research with personal observation, A Knife All Blade offers a counter-reading of the Dutch urban landscape from a diasporic perspective. In collaboration with researcher Carolina Monteiro, the project culminated in the book The Façade, published by Nest, which consolidates a new perspective into an editorial form and proposes photography as a tool to expose, question, and re-edit inherited histories embedded in public space.