Flying into Amazonia, be it Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon or Manaus in Brazil, provides a lavish aerial view over the serpentine Amazon River and the enormous stretch of seemingly never-ending green rainforest. These cities, Amazonian megapolises, sit in the middle of the forest as oddly urban settlements cordoned off but also squeezed by the mass of trees that envelop them. The view is breathtaking. It is also safe, distant, and detached enough to leave a strong visual imprint of the power of the world’s biggest rainforest without shedding any light on the nuances of the lives lived under the canopy of greens nor their histories.
The Western imaginary is keen on superlatives, at once euphoric and disastrous. In the West, Amazonia’s presence is still mostly connected either to the European naturalist’s exploratory fascination—see Alexander von Humboldt and his manifold legacies—or to visually striking discourses about ecological and political destruction and violence: rampant fires by arson and desertification, protests, and state retaliation. Yet, it sometimes seems that even the issue of the ecocide of the Amazon has come into global focus predominantly due to the pressures from climate change. Indeed, while state violence on the streets of the nine countries that span the Amazon makes its way into the international media, the violence in the forest, directed against the Indigenous nations, often largely goes unseen.
Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have their own aerial view of the river and the forest. In the various rituals of healing and reconnecting between humans and non-human entities, Indigenous Amazonian shamans and healers, as well as other members of the community, open their souls to the spirits and often remark that in this process they are able to see the forest from above. It’s been said that they assume a perspective of a bird who sees its surroundings not as a detached map but as an interconnected circle of being where all elements—animal, plant, insect, fish, water, people, spirit—are inseparable. There is no distance, no separation, no contemplation. There is, instead, symbiosis, participation, and care.
Amazonia, among many other biomes, ecosystems, or critical zones of the planet, is a space where extractive colonial capitalist attitudes clash with holistic cosmovisions and the oppressive inequalities experienced by local lives, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Yet Amazonia is also a space where multiple cultural geographies overlap, creating possibilities of different bodies of knowledge encountering each other, lessons in insight and understanding. Amazonia is both a place, a physical entity that traverses state borders—and all the urgent issues which arise from such enforced boundaries—and a point of view, uniting numerous voices and visions that speak for it, from within.
CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia, the current iteration of the biannual Swiss arts festival, is devoted to the voices and visions of Amazonia, its peoples and allies, artistic and activist practices, the wisdom of its elders and the words of writers and scientists and protectors, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Indeed, this edition of the two-month-long festival organizes itself along the thematic lines of the river and the forest, bringing together artists, activists, and thinkers from various parts of Amazonia—Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador—whose work will be present in more than 40 cultural institutions in Switzerland. Marking the beginning of a new festival series focusing on world biomes—CULTURESCAPES Amazonia will be followed by the Sahara, in 2023, the Himalayas, in 2025, and the Oceans, in 2027—this 2021 edition follows thematic lines of decolonization and Indigenous knowledge, ongoing extractivist violence and ecological resistance.
That said, CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia comes with an intention of empathetic witnessing, despite the complications inherent to such a position—translation itself being one. For as Daiara Tukano, the Indigenous artist, activist, and communicator of the Tukano people of Brazil, notes: “Translation is always a treason.” Attempting an act of translation assumes that the experiences, struggles, forms of thinking and systems of knowledges of other people can be expressed in other languages without a loss. Translation is largely a form of power, yes. Nevertheless, witnessing as empathetic presence and as a readiness to listen and learn might be one of the few possibilities to weave connections between different worlds in order to imagine a radically decolonialized non-colonial future together.
- Kateryna Botanova und Jurriaan Cooiman, Kurator*innen, Excerpt from the introduction to "Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology."
