Amazônia

The Amazon is well known yet little understood, and remains a place full of mysteries in the eyes of Europeans, despite five centuries of contact. The vague, simplistic notion of an immense, untouched rainforest peopled with “Indians” living outside of time reduces this vast region to an exotic decor, frozen in the collective imaginary and shaped by centuries of external representations.

The exhibition Amazônia. Indigenous Worlds aims to present this region from the perspectives of its first inhabitants, the Indigenous Peoples. A multi-faceted place, in constant evolution, where social and environmental dynamics are always intersecting.

Rather than portraying the Amazon as a natural space, the exhibition presents it as a cultural space, a place where human and non-human inhabitants, diverse environments, tradition and modernity, as well as the most varied local and global political issues, converge and intertwine.

Just like the Amazonian rivers that spill over their banks and transform the landscape, this exhibition seeks to look beyond the geographic, social and cultural borders that typically frame our understanding of the Amazon to make this region and its peoples both less exotic and more complex.

By focusing on Indigenous perspectives, this exhibition presents diverse ways of being in the world, other ways of building community and maintaining relations with the environment around us.