The first Amazon Biennial combines traditional knowledge with forward-looking perspectives, bringing us to “bubble” in the world’s most prominent forest.

Belém, capital of the huge Brazilian state of Pará, will be hosting in 2025 the next edition of COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Nevertheless, Belém held a preliminary COP meeting between August 3 and 10, inviting members of the Pan-Amazon states (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela, plus Brazil) to discuss joint problems and solutions.

More than 20.000 people took part in the event, thronging hotels and services and, in effect, turning the city’s traffic into a living hell for locals and tourists. That being said, are we seriously still in need of events of this kind, disrupting the life of cities and perhaps awakening their sacred guardians?

This reference is to Boiuna, the enormous snake living at the bottom of the Amazon’s rivers, lakes and streams, but also beneath the city of Belém, according to indigenous legend. Waking up and upsetting the Boiuna would destroy the city, devastated by the snake’s powerful rage.

The first Amazon Biennial, which runs until November 5 in Belém, is bursting with this history of myths and encounters between remarkable cultures.

The biennial, entitled Bubuia: Águas como Fonte de Imaginações e Desejos, is curated by the women’s collective Sapukai – “scream” in the Tupi language – and spans the four floors of an old building, home to a well-known shop in the city.

Hosting more than 120 artists from the Amazonian states, the exhibition provides a dazzling overview of differences, emphasising the many unique features, posing viewpoints that go beyond the common platitudes, and inquiring into the findings of treasured cultural traits, without lapsing into self-referential poetics.

The staging is in fact made up of multiple bodies, “all with different subtleties, together with a personal language that enhances this art venue, possibly reinventing the dialogue between fields of knowledge”, according to co-curator Vânia Leal.

With mostly female participants, the Biennial also pays tribute to the great Brazilian photographer Elza Lima (Belém, 1952). During her 40-year career, Elza presented us with many images depicting brief moments, revealing the deeper Brazil and showing the contradictions between the daily traditions of Pará’s riverside populations and the introduction of modern icons to the communities, starting with television.

Her photographic endeavours reveal the affectionate relationship between the inhabitants and the environment, animals and water, whilst mixing the romantic nature of the old day-to-day life with a condemnation of the people’s extreme hardships in sustaining themselves. 

Francisco Domingos da Silva, better known as Chico da Silva, a Brazilian naïf painter whose work is currently being revived, is among the other artists at the Biennial: he has already been displayed at São Paulo’s Gomide&Co gallery, and had a solo exhibition at Museu de Arte Sacra in January this year.

Chico’s pieces feature magical stories, beasts straight out of nightmares or ancestral legends, such as the Boiuna; the artist employs all the exuberant colours of Amazonian nature in his work.

Gê Viana (Maranhão, 1986) is exhibiting a range of works from the series Couro Laminado, where the artist uses the archive format as a fictional element to present a new approach, built on questioning Brazil’s traditional-colonial iconography, mixing together several different sets of found images from the history of Maranhão and the country as a whole. Nature, festive costumes, rural labour scenes and iconic figures from the Balaiada, the popular uprising that occurred in Maranhão between 1838 and 1841, in an attempt to improve living conditions for the underprivileged, make up the collection on which Gê Viana draws the pieces whose appeal remains far beyond reality, mixing the ancient and the contemporary. 

Elaine Arruda and Mestre João Aires authored one of the most impressive works at the event, in terms of both its size and poetry. An artist from Pará who lives between Belém and São Paulo, Elaine collaborated with naval carpenter João Aires to create the large installation Tijuquaquara. A ship’s mast is stretched from the floor to the ceiling – the long vertical piece that holds the sail, boom, crosstrees and canopy on ships. Stripped of its original purpose, the piece looks back on traditions and changes in navigation on the major rivers of Pará and the Amazon. 

The installation Corpos vulneráveis em tempo de crise (2020) by Acre-based Ueliton Santana is worth highlighting. It recalls the harsh times of the pandemic experienced in the forest’s outermost edges, but also the new mining operations and the neglect in protecting indigenous peoples; a work that spans «multiple identities, empowered by a look from the inside out, in a symbolic output based on diverse languages”, according to the curatorial text by Vânia Leal.

Providing yet another avenue for understanding our times outside of political discourse, while opening the door to pressing and interconnected dialogues, this Biennial needs to be here for years to come to ensure and chronicle the planet’s metamorphosis.

Amazon Biennial – first edition

Bubuia: Águas como Fonte de Imaginações e Desejos

Curated by Vânia Leal and Keyna Eleison

Rua Sen. Manoel Barata, 400 – Campina, Belém – PA, 66015-020, Brazil

https://www.bienalamazonias.com.br

Until November 5, 2023.