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Rosana Alves feels something different when she visits the Bienal das Amazônias. Not only because a photograph hangs on a wall in which he appears on Marapanim beach, but because the space where this event takes place, the Centro Cultural Bienal das Amazônias de Belém (CCBA), was previously a shop, Yamada, where he worked for six years. He was one of thousands of people from the rural hinterland who migrated to the big cities to make a living. Now she is a spectator and protagonist Social studies work: earn your living (2025), snapshots in which he poses in his native Marapanim, a place originally inhabited by the Pacajás Indians, together with the author of the work, his daughter, Roma Rio, who lies at his feet smeared with mud.
Cultural recovery refers to the recovery of indigenous identity by the current generation, whose parents and grandparents have moved away from their roots to seek a better life for their family in urban contexts. Much of this exodus is due to the effects of climate change and industrialization, such as the decline of fisheries in the Amazon basin. This reason is what drives Kaeté, the protagonist of the Akha video Or go back to Patú Anú (2025) to leave his island to work in Belém. Patú Anú is the spiritual world where the Caruanas reside, and it is that ancestral call that recalls Kaeté to her place of origin.
“Recovering the myth, returning to the sources”, reads the poem by Roberto Evangelista, the artist awarded by this biennial, entitled Green distanceedited by Manuela Moscoso. A young exhibition in two senses: it is only in its second edition, and more than half of the 74 participants from the Amazon and the Caribbean are under forty years old. A new race that seeks to recover its origin, moving away from the homogenization that Amazonian art undergoes in international events, as happened at the last ARCO Fair in Spain, or at the Venice Biennale. Here they are not shown in an alien or elite context, but in a major city in the Amazon. And they do so without avoiding their own contradictions and challenges.
In Aiku’è (R-I exist), (2017), Zahy Tentehar reflects on Westernization by painting his face with indigenous motifs, then cleaning himself and, while crying, applying mascara to his eyelashes. Her voice is heard accompanying the action: “I was born in the womb of a country and became a bastard daughter. History has buried my struggle, but it cannot bury my resistance.” The artist Julieth Morales, belonging to the Misak people, shows her helplessness Recover your memory to recover everything (2022) showing the fabrics she sewed following the knowledge of the women of her community; It makes its inability visible, leaving the fabrics unfinished, tangled. The audiovisual is also played Llaki (2025), by the Twana collective, in which the homophobia of the Ecuadorian Amazonian communities is denounced and its beginning is traced back to the criminalization of sex and desire in the colonial era.
Contradictions that the biennial itself does not escape, whose two main sponsors are the companies Shell and Vale, both with a history of conflicts with indigenous populations and ecocide. This is even more surprising if one takes into account that several works of art and instances, such as the public program proposed by climate activist Jean da Silva, address the destruction of the forest.
One of the most political works of the Biennale is presumably decorative and goes almost unnoticed. In several spaces of the CCBA and at the entrance doors of several video rooms, colored threads designed by the Da Tribu collective hang like curtains. To better understand this project, it is best to travel by boat to the nearby island of Cotijuba. To the north is Seringal beach, which takes its name from the rubber tree, the seringueira. There, the community of Pedra Branca manually extracts the latex and with it forms jewels or, in this case, the cords that are exhibited at the Biennale.
A manual and retail production that recalls the most painful past of the region, when at the end of the 19th century, and between 1942 and 1945, the rubber extraction fever that motivated the splendor of Belém and Manaus, caused the exploitation, destruction and death of thousands of “rubber soldiers” who sacrificed their lives cutting the so-called white gold from the trees.
Crossing these rope walls, the viewer passes through dimensions, memories and wounds in this artistic event that revolves around three concepts: distance, accent and dream. The oneiric is linked to the animistic, and so, in thirteen artists we find representations of snakes linked to the spiritual; from the canoe-cobra in the drawings of Feliciano Lana, to the Andean Katari symbolizing fertility converted into LED light by Kenia Almaraz Murillo, to the snake as a meteorological phenomenon in the textile work of Alessandro Fracta, to the patterns of abstract vipers in the murals of Sara Flores. In Gustavo Toaquiza’s painting Ugsha Bad luck in the jungle (2009), we see the snake trying to scare away the presence of toxic companies, while inside Oil tankers in Ecuador (2020), criticism of evangelization is added to the scene of deforestation: an indigenous family reads the Bible on the bank of a polluted river.
If we leave the exhibition hall, three streets away, we find another snake and another link with Catholicism, but with a diametrically opposite meaning. The monument to Father Anchieta represents the “apostle of Brazil” who teaches catechism to an indigenous person kneeling next to a serpent which represents the force of evil.
The Jesuit was said to have the power to tame wild beasts with the word of God. The sculptural complex is surrounded by rubble and clogged sewers. The streets of Belém – downtown, not on the outskirts – continued to be repaired and prepared until recently for the arrival of the apostles of the fight against climate change who will burst into the city in the next few days for the COP30 climate summit. The future of the world will enter the debate addressing aggressive business model and sustainability. Perhaps the gods had to be invoked in that battle. Meanwhile, another type of revolt takes place at the Art Biennale. A revolt towards the origins.
