Neither “green hell” nor “virgin jungle”: the threatened Amazon tells its true story with its own voice and displays its culture at the CCCB | Culture

Neither Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre, nor the explorer Ridgewell of The broken ear of Tintin, nor the Indiana Jones of the Chachapoyan idol and the crystal skull. Forget all the stereotypes about the Amazon, the “green hell”, the “virgin jungle”, the lost world and the salacot, When the mob roarsof cannibal holocaust and of the Anaconda by Jenifer López and Ice Cube who swallows Owen Wilson. The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) invites us to “unlearn” most of what we thought we knew about that immense territory in danger that we Europeans have often imagined as a white (green) curtain to project our adventures, our desires. , our fears and our ambitions.

The exhibition Amazon, the ancestral future, which opens this Wednesday (until May 4) and was presented today, is fascinating: you can even go inside an authentic ceremonial hut, a maloca, experience what the jungle, or deforestation, smells like, listen to ritual songs, read signs in yukuna, admire murals created from ceremonies with , and meet spirits. It is not an easy exhibition, which is not a novelty in the Barcelona center, in which each exhibition takes you back almost to the selectivity exam for its . Not only does the exhibition try to rid itself of all the clichés (sad clichés, paraphrasing Claude Lévi-Strauss), such as the fact that the jungle into which conquerors or explorers entered was uninhabited, “virgin” and inhospitable, an interested misunderstanding, it emphasizes, to legitimize the depredation of its natural resources, “abusive extractivism” as it is called now, but it does so by giving voice to this to the threatened Amazon itself, represented by its inhabitants and especially its thinkers, artists, intellectuals and activists.

And what results is a rich and surprising polyphony – somewhat cacophonous, a layman may think -, a mosaic of information, ideas, beliefs, experiences and dreams, with impressive plastic representations, which forces us to radically change the usual vision of this immense area in which more than 30 million people live —more than 60% of them in urban areas, a topic that is of particular interest to the CCCB—, and which crosses 9 countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana). The exhibition, which collects the new archaeological investigations with aerial and computer methods that have exploded the idea of ​​a sterile Amazon for civilization and invites us to review the concept, highlights that the region has a rich cultural tradition and has been the scene of important technological innovations. such as plant domestication and ceramic production. The exhibition also emphasizes, and this will surprise many, that the jungle is partly the result of indigenous human action, in the manner of an immense garden, over thousands of years. The ancestors of the current inhabitants literally planted the jungle, the exhibition points out, highlighting that this is more of a legacy than any conventional monumental construction.

The exhibition, which includes photographs, videos, music, films, works of art, indigenous objects, maps and a section that reviews in detail the threats against the region (livestock farming, deforestation, drug trafficking, carbon credits, hydroelectric , mining, pharmaceutical extractivism, wild animal trafficking…), also has a very current feminist line incorporating the concept of “the Amazon as a woman” that she develops in her exciting reference book (The Amazon, trip to the center of the worldSalamandra, 2024) the Brazilian writer and journalist Eliane Brum, collaborator of the exhibition and who was at the presentation. Brum, who has settled in the city of Altamira, in Pará, “the most violent Amazonian city” and is one of the great voices in defense of the region and of indigenous cultures and “forest-deforested peoples,” denounces the numerous rapes of women and girls by garampeiros (gold diggers) and turns them into an extension of the brutal global rape of the Amazon, in the same “logic of destruction”; which refers in the exhibition to the indigenous belief in the Great Grandmother of the Universe, the great mother, the female spirit that generates life and the jungle.

Brum has warned that we are close to where the Amazon will collapse, with the global catastrophe that this will mean for the entire world. “We are at a level of forest destruction of 18%, if we reach 20-25%, it is over.” The exhibition calls for changing the “vertical, violent, extractivist and criminal” relationship with the Amazon for a new form of dialogue with the territory and its people.

the head of exhibitions Jordi Costa and the curator Claudi Carreras, explained how the exhibition, very choral, has the collaboration of a large group of experts in the region, especially representatives of the 400 indigenous peoples of the Amazon (who together speak more than 300 different languages), traditional and contemporary creators and thinkers who attest to the cultural, and not just natural, wealth of the territory. Carrera has highlighted the relevance of the exhibition, which emphasizes the centrality of the Amazon in the , with COP 29 in Baku and the effects of the tragic damage in Valencia. Costa has said that above all they have sat down to listen and learn from the experts. Commissioner Carreras has recalled the 10,000 kilometers of travel, “7,000 by river”, over two years to collect the experiences and voices of the exhibition, and has lamented that indigenous peoples have historically been silenced and their voices have been hidden. The exhibition has a series of parallel activities in which characters such as Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomami shaman whose testimony, collected by Bruce Albert, has been published by Captain Swing in the impressive The fall of the sky (2024).

As cicerones of this immersion in the true Amazon, in which there is no shortage of snakes, alligators, jaguars, crocodiles, spider monkeys and all the fauna and plant wealth, have been in the presentation, among others, the cacique and taita uitoto, expert in the myths and traditional plants Emilio Fiagama, from Florencia, Caquetá, in the Colombian Amazon; Rember Yahuarcani, of Uitoto and Cocama origin from Peru, who combines his status as an activist for rights and respect with being a renowned artist with work in the MoMA, the Reina Sofía and the Tate (and being an admirer of Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, with whose work his work bears singular similarities); or Elías Mamallacta, who exhibits an amazing and oozing work of shamanic motifs made with paints made with honey and natural pigments according to the ancestral Kichwa tradition, and who is one of the few artists that one knows who claims that his grandmother became a puma. For his part, the head of the Iba Sales Huni-kuin community dedicated most of his speech to singing “the songs that animate the jungle” and that will also heal us, he said. Other artists, such as Cordelia Sánchez and Olinada Silvano, with work in the exhibition, have toured it with indigenous attire and paintings, and Yaka Hunikuin with a beautiful headdress of blue and yellow macaw feathers. They have all demanded to be able to speak in the first person, with their own voice, about what is their country, and abandon the usual practice of having others do so on their behalf. “Give us back our voice,” Yahuarcani has movingly summarized.

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