Gateway to the Amazon, a port city marked by the confluence of peoples and cultures, Belém, in Pará, opens itself to art. It is in this context that the 2nd Amazon Biennial takes place at the CCBA—the cultural center housed in a popular commercial building in the city's central neighborhood since 2023.
74 artists and collectives from eight Pan-Amazonian and Caribbean countries will be showcasing their work until November 30. The guiding principle is the concept of "Green Distance," inspired by the novel Green Vagomundo, by Benedicto Monteiro, a writer and politician from Pará who was silenced for ten years by the Brazilian military dictatorship. The idea of "green distance," as poetic as it is political, opens up space for multiple perspectives on the forest, its people, memories, and possible futures. The event was incorporated into the France-Brazil 2025 celebrations, which host the 2nd Amazon Biennial, in an initiative that seeks to strengthen and update relations between the two countries.
Under the general curatorship of Ecuadorian Manuela Moscoso, the Biennial is structured collaboratively, with Colombian Sara Garzón as deputy curator, Pará native Jean da Silva responsible for public programming, and Mexican Mónica Amieva as pedagogical curator. Together, they form an international team that expands the event's dialogue and experimental dimension.
Born in Ecuador, at an altitude of 2.800 meters, and now based in Brazil, Manuela Moscoso took on the challenge of holding the 2nd edition of the Biennial in the heart of the Amazon plains. The contrast doesn't go unnoticed: "A different climate, a different time, a different horizon," she summarizes. Working in the humid heat of the forest has become almost a metaphor for the task of articulating so many distinct narratives on a single platform. This multiculturalism translates into the exhibition, with works that trigger collective memories, stories of resistance, and cross-border imaginaries.
As a major honoree, Amazonian artist Roberto Evangelista (1947-2019) occupies a prominent place at the 2nd Amazon Biennial. It is a fitting tribute to an artist concerned with ecology and how to think about the future of the Amazon and the planet. Among his works on display is Nike Uiikana (1989), an installation in which feathers and gourds form triangles, celebrating the union of indigenous peoples and the resistance of environmental leader and rubber tapper Chico Mendes. In Ponta Negra Beach Happening (1992), the artist transformed the Manaus coastline into a stage for an ephemeral artistic gesture, bringing together the public, river and city in a community experience that was reenacted in this edition, with the participation of the widow, Ana Evangelista, and her daughter Sâmara.
Already in Rites of Passage (1996), brought together a thousand empty shoe boxes, two thousand worn shoes, and limestone stones taken from a sidewalk in Manaus. The reassembly of the works was carried out by Regina Vater, an artist, friend, and partner of Evangelista, who helped maintain the integrity of his creations. This dual presence—of Evangelista's memory and Vater's thoughtful gesture—reinforces the affective and political dimension of the tribute.
Comprehensive mosaic
The Biennial also restores visibility to silenced narratives. One example comes from the Ecuadorian collective Tawna, which occupies the forest as a space for listening, ritual, and insurgency. Composed of people of different ethnicities, their anti-colonial cinema bridges activism and politics, rejecting Western frameworks of gender, sexuality, and justice. Indigenous anthropologist Enoc Merino, one of the collective's members, argues that European colonization, with its catechism, silenced the indigenous peoples. His short film showcases the diversity and freedom of expression within the Kichwa Canelos people. "The issue of gender is an ancestral choice in the indigenous universe; homosexuality has always existed, and these choices are part of the culture of these peoples," he states.
The work of artist Jaider Esbell, of the Makuxi people, originally from the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory in Roraima, also resonates in the exhibition, with paintings made with genipap. The works of Esbell, who died in 2021 at the age of 42, reaffirm the vivacity that guides the thinking of Indigenous peoples and the spiritual vitality of their ancestral symbols. Considered an important voice in contemporary Indigenous art in Brazil, his presence at the Amazon Biennial contributes to the recognition of the work of members of this matrix.
Dayro Carrasquilla arrives at the Amazon Biennial with the installation Down Town, constructed from pallets—so common in maritime transport—and a video that traverses the space as a visual narrative. On the ground floor, his work welcomes the public by recreating the narrow alleys of working-class communities, where the intimate intersects with the collective. "The neighborhood is memory, affection, and resistance," the artist asserts, demonstrating how art can restore dignity to historically silenced territories.
Here, the urban doesn't present itself as a hardness, but as a porous body, full of cracks through which hidden stories emerge. It is in these interstices that Carrasquilla finds poetry. The city he summons doesn't fit into official cartographies: it is made of resistance, affections, and memories that insist on lingering.
Of Kokama origin, artist Wira Tini is a self-taught painter. She blends modernism, indigenous cosmology, and Amazonian urban landscapes in a poetics of ancestry, territory, and family memory. In works such as rolled, Edge of the Amazon e Urban Amazon, it reflects the imposed modernity, the waterways, and the invisible presences in Manaus. "My father sailed boats that still transport the riverside population today. I learned to navigate them myself and sailed the river extensively," she says.
In this mosaic, the African matrix is also present, between creation and activism. "The Afro-diasporic matrix is an important element to highlight in this Biennial, giving greater presence to the legacy, memory, and history of Afro-descendant peoples in the Amazon," emphasizes deputy curator Sara Garzón.
Empowered works animate the Biennial in different ways. Among them, the work of Caribbean artist Keisha Scarville, daughter of Guyanese immigrants, stands out, delving into the diaspora and the experience of the Black body. Her photographs move between presence and absence, memory and erasure. Fabrics, shadows, and overlays embody a poetic territory in constant shift, where identity is never fixed, always under construction. The power of certain works lies precisely in this "non-place"; they don't explain, but activate meanings. By bringing together such diverse voices, the Biennial shows that the Pan-Amazon is not just a geographic space, but a living field of relationships, in dispute and transformation.
With accents and languages ranging from Portuguese to Spanish, including Portunhol and various indigenous linguistic branches, the Biennial becomes a vast territory of thought and exchange. From Bolivia comes River Claure, an indigenous photographer who has been gaining ground by challenging Andean identity in the face of Western contemporary culture. His work blends fashion, photography, and social critique in vibrant images, full of freshness and impact.
In her series, young Indigenous people appear in direct dialogue with global pop culture, dismantling the exotic perspective so often projected onto the Andes. Her photographs break down stereotypes, flesh out what has been silenced, and open up space to imagine modernity based on the strength and creativity of the Andean peoples.
In a solitary ritual, Peruvian Antonio Paucar presents, in The Purge with the Mother Plants, a deep-rooted practice in which body and nature merge as a single territory of resistance and surrender.
Amidst healing smoke, invoking gestures, and penetrating silences, his work awakens states of trance, purification, and reconnection. Inspired by indigenous knowledge and ancestral alliances with the earth, Paucar transforms the body into a portal, a space of passage between visible and invisible worlds. His art invites the viewer to traverse this experience and intuit other ways of existing, feeling, and belonging to the natural cosmos.
With a strong poetic charge, Dreams of an endless Amazon, Enchanted (2023), by Brazilian artist Alessandro Fracta, transforms the crossing into a metaphor for the Amazonian experience as a territory of displacement, resistance, and invention. Above the ocean-sized river, a solitary figure stands: standing in the boat, wrapped in a red cloth. A color of symbolic ambiguity, blood and wound, but also fire and vitality, it functions as an axis of tension between life and risk, permanence and transformation. By situating itself on the border between fragility and resistance, the work points to the contemporary conditions of the Amazon, where practices of destruction and traditional ways of life coexist in constant conflict.
Curatorship
Upon taking on the role of curator of the 2nd Amazon Biennial, Manuela Moscoso found a young institution, searching for its identity, yet bold enough to articulate an artistic cartography of the Pan-Amazon region. This, she says, is what makes the experience special: "If it weren't like this, we would always be meeting in other places, under the same central logics. What attracted me here was the possibility of building from the Amazon, for the Amazon."
In Moscoso's view, the region carries very distinct colonial histories, which distance its inhabitants from one another. "We are neighboring countries, but often we don't know each other." The curator recalls, anecdotally, being surprised to remember the existence of a French territory nestled in South America: French Guiana. "It's curious to think how this detail, which should be present in our continental consciousness, sometimes escapes us. This shows how the colonial legacy still shapes our perception of who we are." The clash between familiar and unfamiliar, the Andean landscape and the vastness of the Amazon plain, also led her to reflect on how we relate to the environment. In Ecuador, environmental issues are enshrined in law. "There is an effort at legal protection that, despite all the setbacks, reminds us that nature is a subject of rights and not just a resource to be exploited." This experience shapes her curatorial vision, which understands the forest not as a backdrop, but as a protagonist.
From the point of view of art and environmental activism, it is worth remembering the words of the French critic Pierre Restany in his Rio Negro Manifesto (1978), written after sailing the river alongside artists Sepp Baendereck and Frans Krajcberg: “The Amazon is today the last reservoir, the last refuge of nature on our planet.”
It should be celebrated as hygiene of perception and mental oxygen — an integral, gigantic naturalism, capable of catalyzing our faculties of feeling, thinking and acting,” he wrote.
The difference
At the helm of the Amazon Biennial is Lívia Condurú, a woman who knows how to bring together diverse forces—businesspeople, collectives, and public authorities—around a common goal. This is how she managed to restore an old building in the heart of Belém, rent it, and transform it into the home of the Amazon Biennial since 2023. What sets her apart from the rest? Lívia Condurú doesn't hesitate: "The collective." For her, it's not about creating a simulacrum of the Amazon to cater to the market, but about speaking about real life, the inhabited territories, and shared experiences. For her, the Biennial is a living platform, the boat that glides along the rivers carrying and bringing art; it's a vibrant cultural center, with exhibitions that circulate. "It's resistance, provocation, but also celebration."
With apparent calm, she faces the greatest challenge of any artistic-cultural initiative in the Global South: financial sustainability. "We raised one of the largest funds in Brazil, but the costs are extremely high: building rent, boat maintenance, electricity, and staff. We can't rely solely on the Rouanet Law." She states that they worked with a multi-year plan and sought new sources of funding. "With the same budget that would have supported four exhibitions in other institutions, we held seven, in addition to meetings and international tours. This shows how public money can be better invested when there is commitment."
This same approach extends the Biennial's reach beyond Brazil. In Medellín, Colombia, for example, Éder Oliveira's work "Quintino"—a portrait of a hitman turned folk antihero—found immediate traction. "This shows how distant territories share similar wounds," says the president. Research in French Guiana and Suriname confirms this plural dimension of the Pan-Amazon, revealing a Black, Caribbean, Asian, and diverse region, precisely because it was traversed by colonization.
Does the idea of "regional art" still weigh heavily? Lívia Condurú has no doubts. "It does, but it's a political choice. Why wouldn't crafts be art? Why does criticism only exist in the Rio-São Paulo region? The same plane that takes me there brings critics here. We need to break down this barrier." What truly drives this manager? "Territoriality and collective dignity. I want to be able to walk down the street at night safely; I want a respected territory. Art is work, with bills and responsibilities, but it's also an instrument of transformation. We continue because we believe that strengthening the territory is strengthening the world."
Lívia Condurú sees the Amazon Biennial as an active voice as COP 30, the Climate Conference to be held in Belém in November, approaches. For her, the Amazon cannot be treated merely as a backdrop for climate debates, but must be seen as a living, political, and cultural territory. "Here we discuss mining, oil, and extractivism, but we also invent solutions. We believe in micropolitics, in small collective actions that, together, become weapons of resistance. The Biennial gives this visibility." Thus, the exhibition is doing well. More than just an art exhibition, it is a call to look and listen differently to everything that is at stake when discussing the Amazon.
