An extraordinary, epic and eccentric vision of the Amazon
Sebastião Salgado: Amazônia Science Museum, London SW7 ★★★★★
The much-garlanded Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is at London’s Science Museum to launch a years-in-the-making exhibition of images from the Amazon rainforest. And, not coincidentally, there’s barely a fortnight to go before Cop26 convenes in Glasgow.
Salgado speaks to the urgency of the moment. We must save Amazônia for many reasons, but chiefly because the world’s rainfall patterns depend on it. We should stop buying Amazonian wood; we should stop buying beef fed on Amazonian soya; we should stop investing in companies with interests in Amazonian mining.
There are only so many ways to say these things. On the face of it, Salgado’s enormous exhibition, set to an immersive soundscape by 1970s New Age pioneer Jean-michel Jarre, is more impressive than effective. He is everyone’s idea of an engaged artist but is it even in us, now, to feel any more concerned about the rainforest?
Turns out that it is. Jarre’s music plays a significant part in this show, curated by Sebastião’s wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. Assembled from audio archives in Geneva, it manages to be both politely ambient and often quite frightening in its dizzying assemblage of elemental roars, bird calls, forest sounds and human voices. And Salgado’s epic visions more than match such Stürm und Drang.
Here, rendered in his exquisitely detailed, thumpingly immediate monochrome, is Anavilhanas, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, a wetland so complex and mutable, no one has ever been able to settle there. There are mountains, “inselbergs”, rising out of the forest like volcanic islands in some fantastical South China Sea. There are bravura performances of the developer’s art: rivers turned to tinfoil, and leaves turned to photographic grain, and rainstorms turned to atom-bomb explosions, and clouds caught at angles that reveal what they truly are: airborne rivers. As they spill over the edge of Brazil, they dump more moisture into the Atlantic than the mighty Amazon itself.
Dotted about the exhibition space are oval “forest shelters”: dwellings for intimate portraits of 12 different forest peoples. Salgado acknowledges that this anthropological effort merely scratches the surface: Amazônia’s 192 distinct groups constitute the most culturally and linguistically diverse region on the planet. Capturing and communicating that diversity conveys the scale of the region even better than those cloud shots.
The Ashaninka used to trade with the Incas. When the Spanish came, their supreme god Pawa turned all the wise men into animals to keep the region’s secrets. The highland Korubo became known as mud people, lathering themselves with it against mosquitoes whenever they came down off their hill. The Zo’é place nuts in the mouths of the wild pigs they kill so the meal can join in with its own feast. The Suruwahá happily consume the deadly spear-tip toxin timbó, figuring it’s better to die young and healthy (and many do).
The more we explore, the more we find it’s the profound and sometimes disturbing differences between these peoples that matter; not their surface exoticism. In the end, faced with such extraordinary diversity, we can only look in the mirror and admit our own oddness, and with it our kinship. We, too – this is the show’s deepest lesson – are, in every possible regard, like the playful, charming, touching, sometimes terrifying subjects of Salgado’s portraits, quite impossibly strange.
Until March 20 2022; sciencemuseum.org.uk