All creation involves risk. Riscar (as to draw a line) is the primordial gesture of architecture — expressing imagined forms and siting them upon the territory in the act of building. The spectacular risco (as design of a new city, for example) transformed the previous landscape, wiped off the map the ancient vestigial evidences of those who inhabited the place in the past, expelled poor people to the peripheries, and greatly altered contexts of equilibrium between human and non-human beings who had lived there long before. An ambivalent term, the risco creates and destroys. There is every kind of risk assessed in the capitalist calculation of full extractivism, which advances and marches upon the world. It is a crucial factor in the theatre of operations of the expansionist and (neo)colonial fronts of a risk society — as Beck assessed in his book (1986) — which is also a society of the spectacle, that potent critical dissection of the world elaborated by Debord (1967). Risco results from will, desire and necessity. It is always present in the actions of the human being, inscribed in iron, fire and symbols in the history of this presence on Earth.
* The polysemy of the word risco in Portuguese is not found in a single word in the English language. For this reason, the translation introduces expressions that make explicit the meanings that risco possesses in the language of the original text.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro