Folds Between Body and Map in the Paraense Transamazon

[Original Title: "Dobras entre corpo e mapa na Transamazônica paraense"] The Transamazon Highway (BR-230) in Pará has had its image frozen for decades: a muddy road, stalled vehicles or tractors felling a people-empty forest, opening Amazonian space to a project of authoritarian modernization. This image is reproduced and reproductive in geography education through discourses that impose the regional scale as totalizing and explanatory, at the expense of place-ed [lugarizadas] scales in the field. The result of this dynamic is not merely a distance between what is lived as phenomenon and what is learned as concept; it moves toward the reproducibility of an (in)existence of the creative potency of vicinal roads — places of geographical construction — and against mappings that, from within, might force a rethinking of the unshakeable foundations of frozen images, generalist maps, and their standardizing projections, scales, and symbology. To this end, we conducted — together with students and teachers from two vicinal schools in the municipality of Pacajá (PA), from early 2016 to 2019 — a series of mental maps: that is, attempts to provoke the body in the map and the map in the body within a limit-situation [situação-limite] of existence. This bodily engagement in the attempt to think the vicinal road as place-in-institution — and from there, as a situated opening to the world — is what gives meaning to geocartography. We conclude: (a) the emergence of a subjective sense that does not separate the emotional from the symbolic in the making of maps; (b) the bodily engagement and situated gaze of teachers and students does not hold merely the value of a totalizable example, but of an opening to the new, insofar as they produce a symbology that reveals the need to build a dialogical bridge between what is lived in the vicinal road and the world that thematizes it in an (in)existed manner.