Located in the host city of the imminent COP30, the second edition of the Bienal das Amazônias stands strong in its social messaging despite a wishwashy curatorial rhetoric
A series of fantastic, and fantastical, paintings by Brus Rubio opens curator Manuela Moscoso’s exhibition Verde-Distância. They show exuberant scenes of dancing and feasting, the protagonists mostly anthropomorphised animals. In Meemeba (Fiesta de chicha del Pijuayo) (2024) a party is being held in celebration of chicha, the fermented alcoholic drink that has a central role in the life of the Murui and Bora Indigenous peoples, of whom Rubio is a member. Overindulging
birds lie in hammocks holding their potbellies; a striped-faced rodent serves bowls of drink, and a dance of blue-faced birds and anteaters is in full swing. Facing this bacchanalia, however, is Barrio Abajo (2007–08), by Colombian artist Dayro Carrasquilla, a video and installation that casts a shadow over the fun with its evocation of precarious existence, a tension between cosmological, ecological and economic visions of the Amazon that runs through this gathering of 74 artists from the nine countries the forest touches (though not all the work addresses the forest itself, or is by artists living under its canopy). Through Carrasquilla’s lens we witness the inhabitants of a small village forced to navigate the entrance and exit of the settlement by way of an ad hoc bridge of wooden pallets over boggy, partially flooded ground; the basics of state provision absent in this Afro-Colombian community. In front of the video projection, an installation of pallets that visitors can walk on themselves recreates the wobbly, dangerous path shown onscreen.
Moscoso divides her biennial into three sections titled ‘dreams’, ‘memory’ and ‘accent’: the first represents ‘an embodied way of sensing matter that often escapes visibility’, while ‘Memory is archive, gesture, and rhythm. It unfolds in the flesh, in silence, and in the ground itself,’ and ‘Accent resonates beyond speech’. Similarly overwrought curatorial notes foreground ‘cosmologies’ and nod to ‘spirituality’ at every turn. It does a disservice to the class politics embodied by so much of the excellent work here (topical to Belém, a busy port city and host to climate change conference cop30 in November). Ignoring the curator’s rhetoric, what emerges from the art itself instead is a subtle narrative concerning industriousness and perseverance; we’re presented with religious observance – and festivity – as a necessary balm to a hard life lived amid unforgiving geography or economic fragility.
Mali Salazar shows multiple copies of Los Perros Vagabundos, a 1980 edition of a 1939 book by Manuel Robles Alarcón concerning the stray dogs of the title. Here, though, the artist has partially obscured the cover with delicate, washy mountainscapes, the hostile geography mapped onto the hardships of the hounds illustrated beneath. The work is echoed later in the exhibition by Augusto N. Martínez’s photographs of Ecuadorian mountains from the turn of the twentieth century. Though Martínez’s interest was scientific, the images of the soaring, snow-laden peaks conjure the sublime: in one 1903 photo titled O Casaguala visto de sua base sul-sudeste (Casahuala Seen from Its South-Southeast Base), tiny figures can just about be discerned, black specks dwarfed by the white landscape. The forms are mirrored by Remy Jungerman’s posu Tumuk Humak (2025), a largescale sculpture (the title referencing the Tumucumaque mountain range in the artist’s native Suriname) featuring four sheets of wood arranged in a trapezoidal fashion, their surfaces collaged with fabric used in Winti, the Afro-Surinamese religion, and streaked with white paint.
Motifs of labour proliferate, work sometimes at odds with its ecological impact, the economics of survival frequently a question of murky environmental ethics in the region: Comitiva Pantanal (2025), a spotlit installation by Brazilian artist Buga Peralta, features 540 model clay cows as they are herded by clay cowboys, a sea of cattle treading a surface of dust and invoking the culture of the Pantanal, Brazil’s richly biodiverse interior wetlands; filmmaker and geographer Simon Uribe’s
Colonos (2025) features Colombian agricultural workers, one man complaining to the camera about the government as he tinkers with his tractor; in one of two startlingly vivid 2012 canvases by Surinamese painter Rinaldo Klas we see a male worker in the burning sun laying some kind of pipe across the deathly red earth, while the second depicts the top of a crudely built pulley system that evidently runs down to a mine below. This vein of social realism is present too in Chico Ribeiro’s oil paintings (from 2023–25): rich, detailed scenes of subsistence farming including a man tending a bed of spindly green crops with a hoe, while in another a family sits on the bare concrete floor of their house sorting their produce. There is a stoicism to all these scenes, a sense of getting on and getting by against the odds, a pragmatism that underpins the moments of levity and evocations of powers and worlds beyond our own.
That latter theme is foregrounded in a display of remarkable photographs by Julia Chambi, mostly from the 1980s, of Andean festivals and rituals. Works by Indigenous artists, including a brightly patterned mural by Olinda Silvano and a series of intertwining wall-hung acrylic snakes by José Luis Macas, portray the symbolism of their respective Shipibo-Konibo and Kichwa cultures. Peter Minshall, the Trinidad-based carnival artist, is represented in a largescale museological display of documentation and paraphernalia relating to his five-decade career creating the pre-Lenten moments of loud and raucous escape. In one of the most remarkable works on show, a purported documentary from 1983 by Gianfranco Annichini – shots of life lived on the river of Iquitos in Peru, where wooden houses on stilts and waterways act as mode of transport, place of work and site of sociability – is narrated by the Spanish monologue of a community radio announcer passing on reports of local weddings, births and deaths.
Moscoso borrowed ‘Verde-Distância’ from a book by Brazilian journalist and politician Benedicto Monteiro, written in 1964 while he was imprisoned during the military dictatorship. At the heart of Monteiro’s political philosophy was the idea of social alienation: the vastness of the Amazonian geography creating a distance between those within its confines and the world outside. For Monteiro, who took up agrarian causes in defence of rural workers and composed the 1962 workers’ anthem O Canto do Lavrador (The Farmer’s Song), the forest could also provide a sense of class solidarity, a shared sensibility that crossed peoples and borders. It is this politics that gives the exhibition its edge, not the abstract notion of spirituality the curatorial schema claims.
Centro Cultural Bienal das Amazônias, Belém, through 30 November
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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