Dreaming the Forest

“Dreaming the Forest” is a photo exhibition of works of the award-winning Brazilian photojournalist Victor Moriyama. It presents a large selection of Moriyama’s photo and video works which were shot in different parts of the Amazon rainforest over the course of a few last years. As a photo correspondent working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, The Guardian, El País, and Der Spiegel, he spent considerable stretches of time diving in lives of various Indigenous communities in different parts of the Brazilian Amazon. He documented increasing violence against Indigenous nations of Brazil and the biodiversity of the rainforest that they preserve and maintain. He followed agrarian conflicts, land grabbing, illegal mining and logging that lead to devastating deforestation in order to demonstrate how extreme social injustice and uncontrolled globalization lead to genocide and climate change. For his exhibition in Brasilea, Victor starts from the fact that in 2019, a total of 9,762 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest was destroyed, an area as large as Lebanon. This set a record for deforestation: an increase of 29.5% on the previous year. Quoting from Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, an indigenous leader of the Yanomami people, “From time to time, nature, confronted with such ignorance and devastation, causes a wave of mass destruction… Nature will die in embers.” The exhibition will envelop in 5 chapters, allowing the viewers to follow the ways in which once rich and vibrant rainforest, inhabited and supported by its people, is being destroyed by fires that “clean” the land for cattle, illegal logging, and soya cultivation that exhausts once rich soil. What is left when farmers and the loggers leave, is an empty desert. A curated selection of several dozens of Moriyama’s photos will be complemented with video works, an immersive audio installation, and a specially commissioned video interview with the photographer. “My ambition is for my photographs to have an impact on the general public, triggering a reaction so that we can force the authorities and companies to take action and implement proper sustainable forest management. With the knowledge of the forest-dwelling communities and with contributions from science based on the concept of the green economy, we could find satisfactory ways of reversing this situation of climate emergency. The challenge is here. It is time to act!” says Moriyama.