Pororoca is a natural phenomenon when the current of the Amazon River meets the ocean, forming a big wave. This encounter between freshwater and saltwater has a violent oddity similar to that felt by Cristina Lamas in 2016, when she travelled the Amazon River from Manaus to Belém do Pará, in her first encounter with the region. The exhibition Pororoca curated by Natxo Checa, at Fundação Carmona e Costa, is the consequence of the artist’s several trips to this place.

The Amazon River, in South America, has the largest volume of water in the world and the Amazon has the largest hydrographic basin on the planet. At over seven million square kilometres, it accounts for about a fifth of the world’s river flow and the water in the Amazon rivers is equivalent to 20% of the Earth’s net freshwater. “I was fascinated by the sheer scale of freshwater. I am from the sea. I was delighted with the dynamics of the riverside people, with the indigenous people who inhabit the cities and the regions outside them.” The fascination referred to by Cristina Lamas is for her influenced by the violent oddity mentioned at the beginning of the text, when she was confronted with the massive environmental problems of this abandoned and extremely poor area of Brazil, contrasting with the grandiosity of the nature and life existing there.

After this first clash, she vowed to return to the Amazon River, which she did in 2018-2019, traversing it from Iquitos in Peru to Manaus in Brazil. Along this route, she took many photographs, notes and visual notes, as she called them, also visiting many museums and libraries, gathering the base information for her work. These are documents of an Amazon different from the romanticised image that exists of it as a virgin region where nature remains untouched. “There are countless studies that deal with the Amazon as a human construction. It was never virgin, because it always had inhabitants; nor was it untouched, because it was always intensely exploited”. Cristina Lamas has travelled along the drug trafficking route, many places where the poisoning of the river waters has been identified and where many activists (environmentalists, etc.) have been assassinated for fighting in defence of the region. An unsafe place but where, at the same time, there is an unequalled life created by the ecosystem teeming with animal and plant species and, therefore, a paradox.

Rita Natálio, in a conversation at Fundação Carmona e Costa about the exhibition, described this context as being “marked by a proliferation of life and very particular relational, aesthetic, human experiences, but also by an ecological and social violence. The Amazon has an enormous socio-biodiversity, which results from a complex combination of ways of life that are unique in the Amazonian context and developed by traditional peoples, including indigenous, who create ways of transforming and growing the territory. This forest and human biome, despite its unique value, is continually threatened by reactive monoculture forces.”

The exhibition Pororoca emerges in this context. “These cultural, environmental obstacles made me draw,” says Cristina Lamas. Drawings, collages, objects and neons that mix elements, images, architectural fragments, colours and tones from different places. Tickets or leaflets gathered during her stay, or images that aroused her interest and that she tried to register photographically, fabrics dyed with natural herbs from the regions she passed through, or representations of these plants, are elements that nourish the exhaustive research she carried out.

In one of the exhibition rooms the red tone of the achiote stands out, a fruit whose pigment is used by Brazilian indigenous peoples in body paintings. Several geometric drawings, “deconstructed” patterns created by the artist, produce a kind of optical illusion or a kinetic movement of the eye, mentioned by Susana de Matos Viegas in a conversation in January about the exhibition. This is particularly important for the people of those regions.

These drawings are associated with a series of “three-dimensional drawings”, according to the epithet used by Cristina Lamas, creating necklaces whose “beads” are made of paper cut out and painted with Indian ink and graphite. These objects are obviously reminiscent of indigenous jewellery, but also of incantations, Afro-American spiritual and religious manifestations; as well as quilombos, communities created by populations formed in situations of territorial, social and cultural resistance in colonial Brazil. These communities were made up of enslaved black people who sought to achieve freedom and organised themselves into autonomous communities. Today, the quilombolas or residents of quilombos, recognised since 2007 by the Federal Government of Brazil as a traditional community, form communities with daily production practices, sustainable development and a culture different from the local one.

Music is all over the exhibition through an inventory of “ritmos bailables”, synthesised in the “rhythm” of red neon on a green wall. According to Cristina Lamas, in Amazonia “silence is death. Amazonia is vibration, life, in the morning we hear the birds, during the day there is always music and at night we listen to the croaking of the frogs and the buzzing of insects.” This rhythm was reinforced by Domenico Lancellotti’s ‘Som’ intervention that took place in December in the exhibition galleries. Going through this dance, Pororoca ends as it began, with a cuia, a bowl made from the fruit of the gourd, an indigenous object used to eat the traditional tacacá typical of the region or drink water. This nourishing object personifies the artist herself.

Pororoca is a complex and complete reflection on a strange and violent territory, fascinating and magnificent, plenty of paradoxes where we can find similarities with the European territory where we live, starting with the Portuguese language. Interestingly, Cristina Lamas’ investigation started before the inauguration of the former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro and the outcome is now shown after four years of a nefarious term for this region, whose consequences start to be visible, at the same time as the country feels a wave of hope for Brazil’s new government.

Pororoca by Cristina Lamas, curated by Natxo Checa, can be seen at Fundação Carmona e Costa in Lisbon until February 19.