01/22 – 7 p.m. Opening: Viva Amazônia – Contemporary Brazilian Photography

From January 22 to March 14.

Long live Amazonia! born as an invitation to admiration. For those people who observe the jungle through distant maps or fragmented news, the exhibition proposes another gesture: entering the Amazon as one who enters a living, pulsating and multiple body. Here, the jungle is not an exotic setting or an abstract territory: it breathes in rivers that merge with the sky, in burnt trunks that still insist on standing upright, in skins, gestures and silences. The contemporary Brazilian photography brought together in this set reveals the Amazon as a complex system of life, where nature, culture, spirituality and conflict are inextricably intertwined.

The fifteen artists who make up the exhibition – Alberto Cesar Araujo, Anna Kahn, Bruno Kelly, Denilson Baniwa, Fatinha Silva, Gabriela Biló, Genilson Guajajara, João Farkas, Kamikia Kisedje, Luciana Magno, Moara Tupinambá, Paula Sampaio, Renato Soares, Ricardo Martins and Walda Marques – coming from different regions, generations and worldviews, build a chorus of voices that rejects any single narrative. There are looks that document and others that fable; images that denounce violence and others that celebrate everyday resistance. Together, they reveal a plural Amazon: ancestral and contemporary, wounded and powerful, crossed by political disputes, but also by millennial knowledge, affections and ways of being that defy the logic of exploitation.

in time ofclimate emergencyViva Amazonia!, affirms photography as a tool for awareness, memory and ethical urgency. The images don’t just ask for contemplation: they call for responsibility. Made by São Paulo Photography Festival and the Paranapiacaba Photography Festival, in collaboration with the International Association of Photography Festivals (IPFA)the exhibition invites the European public to a sensitive encounter with a decisive territory for the balance of the planet. To look at these photographs is to recognize that the Amazon is not a “distant place”, but a shared present – and that the future inevitably depends on the way we choose to look at it, listen to it and protect it.

This exhibition at Galeria Golfes is possible thanks to the collaboration between the International Photography Festivals Association (IPFA), the São Paulo Photography Festival, the Paranapiacaba Photography Festival and the curatorship of João Kulcsár.